v1.0.1 / chapter 12 of 15 / 01 mar 08 / greg goebel / public domain
* By early 1945, after a relatively idle fall, the Red Army was ready to begin its drive on the Reich again, pressing into western Poland, seizing East Prussia and obtaining a foothold in Pomerania. Once Soviet troops had seized German territory, German civilians suffered the full brunt of vengeance for German atrocities in the East.
With the end of the war in sight, Stalin met with Churchill and Roosevelt at Yalta in the Crimea to discuss the postwar order. It didn't end up being much of a discussion: Stalin had his own ideas of what he wanted, was not inclined to make any real concessions to the Western Allies, and the meeting accomplished little other than to raise suspicions of Soviet intentions in the minds of British and American leadership. In the meantime, planning went forward for the final drive on Berlin.
* While the Red Army idled on the Vistula, Soviet armored columns pushed into the Balkans. Rumania quickly surrendered, with King Michael dismissing the prime minister, surrendering to the Soviet Union, and declaring war on Germany. When Soviet forces approached Sofia in September 1944, the Bulgarian government did a similar about-face. It was an easier turnabout for the Bulgarians, since they had traditionally been friendly with the Soviets and had not participated in the invasion of the USSR.
Winston Churchill visited Moscow in October 1944. Churchill had never had many illusions about Stalin, and the tragedy of the Warsaw Uprising was no more than confirmation of what he had always believed. However, there was not much he could do to blunt Stalin's ambitions in Eastern Europe. The Red Army was there, and there was no way to change that reality.
Churchill was able to obtain a small concession. He agreed with Stalin that Bulgaria, Rumania, and Hungary would be in the Soviet sphere of influence, with the condition that the Soviets would not interfere in Greek politics. Yugoslavia was left on the table, while Stalin simply refused to discuss Poland. Britain had gone to war with Hitler over Poland, however, and the British were not about to give up on the subject.
By that time, it was clear to almost everyone that the war in Europe was entering its last stage. Sensible Germans recognized it, but whatever sensibility Hitler had was disappearing. The rational strategy for the Germans would have been to hold the line as well as they could in the East and simply wait for the British and Americans to roll up from the West, sparing Germany a degrading occupation by the loathesome Bolsheviks.
In fact, for the moment the situation in the East was stable and such a strategy was practical. Hitler hardly considered it. He intended to hold out to the bitter end, hoping for the chance that some miracle, above all a falling out between the Soviets and the Western Allies, would save the day. In hopes of such miracles, on 16 December 1944, he threw 300,000 troops against the Americans in the Ardennes Forest in Belgium and Luxembourg. The offensive achieved tactical surprise and, with Allied air power neutralized by nasty winter weather, made good progress at first. However, American resistance solidified and the offensive began to grind down, failing to reach critical objectives.
On Christmas Eve 1944, Colonel General Heinz Guderian, now head of the German Army general staff, reported to Hitler at the Fuehrer's "Adlerhorst (Eagle's Roost)" headquarters, not far from Frankurt-on-Main. Hitler had prudently given up his Wolf's Lair headquarters in East Prussia in November. Guderian reported that the Ardennes offensive had shot its bolt, and that once the weather improved and Allied reinforcements arrived, the offensive would be crushed. In the meantime, he continued, German intelligence had determined that the Red Army was engaged in an enormous buildup along the northern sectors of the Eastern Front. Guderian suggested that the Ardennes offensive be terminated immediately and the troops transferred East to meet the Soviet threat.
Hitler refused to listen to Guderian, astoundingly replying that the estimates of Soviet strength were "rubbish"; that the Red Army was actually threadbare and hardly had any tanks; that the Soviets were on the edge of collapse. Jodl backed the Fuehrer and Guderian was stymied. At dinner, Heinrich Himmler, who Hitler had just recently given a military command on the upper Rhine, told Guderian that the threat of a Soviet attack was a fraud: "It's all an enormous bluff."
Within a week, Hitler had finally admitted to his generals that the Ardennes offensive had failed, but still insisted that Germany would be able to fight on and triumph in the end. On 9 January 1945, Guderian returned from an inspection tour along the Eastern Front and informed the Fuehrer that what was left of Army Group A and Army Group Center were completely vulnerable, their lines penetrated by Soviet bridgeheads where buildups were clearly being concentrated. The commanders of the groups recommended withdrawal to better defensive positions.
Hitler brushed off Guderian's concerns. Reichs Marshal Goering was there and broadly declared that most of the huge number of Soviet aircraft cited by German intelligence were merely decoys. OKW chief Keitel emphatically agreed with Goering. The Fuehrer refused to authorize a withdrawal, claiming that the current situation simply proved how foolish all the previous withdrawals had been. Hitler told Guderian that the German Army was strong and could deal with the Soviets; Guderian replied that the defense was about as sturdy as "a house of cards".
* Stalin was planning on moving very soon, having decided to jump off on 12 January 1945. His decision remains something of a lingering testimonial to Stalin's falsifications of facts. On 6 January 1945, Churchill sent him a letter to ask about Soviet offensive plans. According to persistent mythology, apparently encouraged by Soviet historians, Churchill pleaded for the Red Army to help relieve the pressure on British and American forces in the Ardennes, and Stalin graciously agreed to move up the start date of the assault from 20 January.
This was a bogus scenario on the face of it, since the German offensive in the Ardennes had been broken by Christmas 1944, and the only pressure the British and Americans were under was to see how many Germans they could kill or capture before the survivors got out of reach. The Red Army's preparations were almost complete and they could have moved even sooner than 12 January if the order were given. Churchill's letter was simply a request for information, but Stalin used it as a pretext to show how he was "rescuing" the Western Allies.
In any case, the Red Army offensive would be conducted over a 480 kilometer (300 mile) wide front, with the Third Belorussian Front on the northern end of the line, skirting the shores of the Baltic; the Second Belorussian Front next; the First Belorussion Front in the center; and the First Ukrainian Front in the south.
The Third Belorussian Front was still under Chernyakhovsky, but in November Rokossovsky had been moved to command of the Second Belorussian Front, with Zhukov taking his place in charge of the First Belorussian Front. This switch meant that Rokossovsky had been moved off center stage to a supporting role, and he suspected Zhukov, who had seemed friendly to him, had engineered it. In reality Stalin himself had made the decision: Rokossovsky was half-Polish and was not entitled to top honors. The First Ukrainian Front remained under Konev. The entire operation was under the direct personal control of Stalin.
Although the weather was cold, icy, and foggy, rendering air power ineffective, the offensive went forward as Stalin promised. In fact, the Red Army tended to like to fight in foul weather, believing with good reason that under such conditions Soviet troops had the advantage over the enemy. Before dawn on 12 January, the First Ukrainian Front began the assault from the Red Army's bridgehead across the Vistula at Sandonmierz, well south of Warsaw. The attack opened with the Red Army's traditional massive artillery bombardment, which lasted for three hours. A German officer on the receiving end compared it to "the heavens falling down on earth."
When the big guns ceased, waves of armor and infantry poured forward. The Germans were caught off guard and the entire 48th Panzer Corps, consisting of three divisions, was almost completely wiped out. The 24th Panzer Corps was supposed to be operating as a reserve, but the offensive slammed into it before a counterattack could be organized, with the Germans losing two more divisions.
To the north of Warsaw, Chernyakhovsky's Third Belorussian Front jumped off on 13 January, to be followed by Rokossovsky's Second Belorussian Front the next day, 14 January. These attacks initially bogged down in the face of stubborn German resistance, as well as marshy terrain, snowstorms, and thick fog that made fighting difficult. Zhukov was not happy with the weather, but his First Belorussian Front also went forward on 14 January, the troops encouraged by loudspeakers blasting out inspiring music. The Germans had been expecting Zhukov's attack, having observed the buildup and Red Army sappers clearing minefields, and had sensibly abandoned their front lines before the artillery barrage fell on it. It did them little good, since Zhukov's tanks and troops quickly punched through the rear defenses, driving around Warsaw and into the ruins of the city.
On 15 January, Hitler returned from the Eagle's Roost headquarters to Berlin to deal with the crisis, taking up residence in a bunker built under the Reichs Chancellery. Those around him found him sickly, far from the domineering personality he had once been, aged and seemingly senile beyond his years. His breath was very foul, which made listening to his rants at close range even more unpleasant. The Fuehrer did little but issue useless orders and fume at the incompetence of the Wehrmacht as Soviet forces rushed forward. To spite the Army generals, on 24 January he ordered Himmler to take charge of Army Group Vistula, a newly-formed command in East Prussia made up of the remnants of units that had been chewed up on the front lines. Hitler felt that a true Nazi like Himmler would be able to accomplish the miracles that the German Army's bungling generals let slip from their fingers.
Himmler's staff at Army Group Vistula found him appalling, uninspiring in manner and appearance, and with not the least notion of how to fight a war. Himmler had of course a lot of experience in directing terror against unarmed civilians, but dealing with people who could shoot back and then some was an entirely different matter. He was completely blind to his limitations as a general and made it clear that he had no interest in taking advice from experienced professionals. Himmler's attempts over the next few weeks to stem the Red tide ranged from ineffectual to disastrous, though he was diligent in mouthing threats to keep the weak-willed in the fight, ordering a few executions to show the threats were serious: that was what he knew how to do, after all. He did everything he could to disguise the disastrous state of affairs at the front from the Fuehrer.
No doubt when Soviet intelligence got wind of Himmler's command, they thanked Hitler for being so helpful. One Soviet tank commander crowed: "Our tanks move faster than the trains to Berlin!" Tankers would often drive through the night, though the drivers would sometimes fall asleep and blunder into things. This usually did the tanks no great harm, but it would give the crews a nasty jolt.
* The house of cards in the East was falling down as Guderian had predicted. As he probably also could have predicted, the Fuehrer blamed everyone for the disaster, railing about the "weaklings and traitors" around him. Hitler was particularly furious when the defenders of Warsaw pulled out on 16 January, with the city was completely in Soviet hands the next day. Hitler had demanded that the city be held, even though German forces there were far too thin on the ground to have done more than inconvenienced the Red Army before they were slaughtered. Hitler sacked General Joseph Harpe, commander of Army Group A, and replaced him by General Ferdinand Schoerner. Harpe might have been able to consider himself the luckier of the two.
Guderian had pleaded with the Fuehrer to transfer forces to the East, and was somewhat surprised when Hitler agreed and said that he would transfer the 6th SS Panzer Army. However, to Guderian's outrage, the Fuehrer then said that 6th SS Panzer would be sent to try to recapture oilfields near Budapest in Hungary, and not be thrown into the fight in Poland. The counteroffensive into Hungary would go ahead as ordered, and would come to nothing.
Guderian had approved the withdrawal from Warsaw and so he was the brunt of the Fuehrer's wrath. On 18 January, three of Guderian's staff officers were arrested by the Gestapo and interrogated. Guderian insisted that they had acted according to his instructions, and so he was interrogated as well.
* By 26 January, Zhukov's First Belorussian Front had isolated the fortress city of Poznan. The Wehrmacht got a short breathing spell from a blizzard on 27 and 28 January. The snow melted quickly, bogging the Soviets down in mud. The Luftwaffe, operating off of hard-surfaced runways while the Red Air Force was trapped on muddy forward airfields, obtained temporary air superiority and hammered Soviet columns for two days, flying over 5,000 sorties and inflicting major damage.
However, the Red Army had put up with worse and pushed on. By the first of February, the Red Army had bridgeheads over the Oder. Zhukov wanted to drive right on to Berlin, but the Red Army had overextended itself and was too far out on a limb with its lines of supply. German resistance had solidified on the Oder line as well. In fact, Zhukov's northern flank was dangerously exposed, and the Germans predictably took advantage of it, launching an attack with the 3rd Panzer Army in mid-February that pressed the Soviets hard for a few days until it ran out of steam. The Vistula offensive was over. Now the Red Army would regroup and resupply for the last push.
* The Vistula offensive brought the war home to German citizens in full force. Masses of civilians had fled west from East Prussia and Pomerania to get away from the Red Army. Erich Koch, who retained his authority over East Prussia after the Reich had lost the Ukraine, had refused to authorize any evacuation of civilians. However, he and his cronies sensibly decided to run away, giving the green light for everyone else to do the same, though since the rules technically still applied, citizens were liable to be shot for defeatism. Fear of what Red Army troops would do to Germans made that risk worth taking.
The fears had plenty of basis in fact, since Soviet propaganda and political commissars at the rank-and-file level were hammering into the troops the idea that the time for revenge was near. Propagandist Ilya Ehrenberg led the charge with bloodthirsty editorials in the Red Army's newspaper, KRASNAYA ZVEZDA (RED STAR). They didn't need much encouragement, since the troops were all aware of what the Germans had done in the USSR, and many of the soldiers had personal scores to settle.
When the Red Army came upon German villages, the soldiers had a drunken party of looting, vandalism, rape, and murder. Rape was the preferred instrument of vengeance, partly because the proportion of German menfolk around was low, most of them being in the ranks. The failure of the Germans to dump their liquor before the enemy arrived did much to aggravate the situation, since even good-natured Soviet soldiers tended to become animals when they were good and drunk. Old women and young girls were gang-raped, sometimes until they died, and anybody who showed the slightest inclination to object was casually shot. Women were found stripped naked, crucified with nails to barn doors. Tanks rolled over and crushed columns of refugees.
What really infuriated many Soviet troops was the relative prosperity of even the humblest German farmer, compared to the widespread poverty of the USSR. Most German farmhouses had electric lighting and radio receivers, unthinkable luxuries for the average Soviet peasant. These folk had invaded the Soviet Union to plunder the people when the Germans were so much better off? The worst that could be done wasn't half enough.
Not all of the soldiers were so cruel, of course, some trying to be kindly to destitute civilians -- particularly children -- but there was little official attempt to restrain the troops, and in fact on occasions soldiers simply shot officers who tried to do so. Red Army troops were often very undisciplined and insubordinate, surprising given the Soviet state's inclination to the most drastic punishments for downright imaginary infractions.
They were not the obedient little Red robots that state propaganda made them out to be. Although newsreels might have reported how troops would charge shouting: "For Stalin! For the Motherland!" -- later a veteran would comment: "I'm sure we shouted something ... but I don't think it was that polite." One story related how a truck was blocking a vital road, badly snarling traffic. A woman soldier named Lydia who was trying to direct the traffic lit into the driver, who simply poured back abuse in her face -- until he noticed the door of a staff car open, too se an angry Marshal Rokossovsky get out with a pistol in his hand. The driver froze with terror. An officer who was in the cab of the truck with him got out and ran away into the bushes.
Those officers who tried to go up the chain of command about the rapes and atrocities were told to shut up; if they didn't, they stood a good chance of being arrested. The official line was that things like that didn't happen. Of course they did. If young men, of any nationality or race, are given weapons and allowed to do as they please, more than a few are likely to take full advantage of the situation without any apparent pains of conscience.
* Besides, it wasn't like they were doing things that those at the top didn't do as well. After the informal looting and vandalism of frontline troops had moved on, specialist NKVD units came in to inventory the catch and grab everything they could, as per Stalin's plan to squeeze the Germans for everything he could get out of them.
The NKVD would obtain very valuable German technologies and technical expertise for the Soviet Union, though most of the top German scientists and researchers would flee West and surrender to the British and Americans. The Soviets would also obtain quantities of raw materials and numbers of Germans for forced labor, though Soviet citizens would continue to be the backbone of Stalin's work camps. As far as the seizure of factory machinery went, however, it would prove to be about as wasteful an exercise as the mindless looting of the troops.
Industrial machinery is normally specified to meet the requirements of a specific task. Trying to take some machine that doesn't meet such specifications and shoehorn it into a process is troublesome, in fact likely to be more troublesome than it's worth. Such machinery also requires regular maintenance and people who are trained in its operation, as well as a logistical system to obtain parts and support to keep it running. Without such things, it's generally no more than so much junk. It was another sign of Stalin's crude thinking that he saw machines as something like so many bales of hay or trainloads of coal, to be tallied up on a list of valuables; and results were the Stalinist system at its worst. The machinery looted from factories and the like would mostly end up as rusty scrap -- which was just as well because often it had been damaged beyond reasonable repair in its removal and transport anyway.
Of course, the effort did help weaken the hated Germans, but if that had been the objective, it would have been much less effort to have simply dynamited the lot of it. Such considerations were beyond the scope of the orders given the NKVD teams, and they were very earnest in making sure nothing of importance was overlooked.
* Harshness might have been satisfying, but it had a serious drawbacks. It made the Germans more willing to fight, and Goebbels' propaganda machine played up Soviet atrocities for all they were worth. Goebbels accused "the Jew Ilya Ehrenberg, Stalin's favorite rabble-rouser", of inciting the rapes. Ehrenberg protested, truthfully, that he had actually never said any such specific thing, for all the difference it made.
The revenge also distracted Soviet troops from the business of fighting. It was more fun to grab loot and women than it was to confront an enemy that, however badly bruised, was still able to fight back. Rokossovsky understood this and issued orders to discourage such misconduct, but his orders were poorly enforced. Having acquired bad habits, Soviet troops would also often become indiscriminate in their application, engaging in rape and looting against supposedly "friendly" populations elsewhere and leading local Communist leaders to complain to Stalin. Koba was furious when he was told British troops were much better-behaved than his own.
Many Germans managed to stay out of the rough hands of the Red Army. In the first few weeks of 1945, an estimated 8.5 million fled west. It was a brutal journey, undertaken in very cold weather without food or shelter, with Poles robbing and beating them when the opportunity arose. Even when the refugees made it to the strictly relative safety of Berlin and other places in the west, resources were very scarce and life would remain harsh. Running away was still better than the alternative.
* Hitler continued his own preparations for a last stand. A few months earlier he had established a home defense force, the "Volkssturm", its ranks to be staffed by old men and teenage boys. Of course Hitler thought the Volkssturm would be able to work miracles, and he was also careful to make sure that the Volkssturm remained under direct Nazi Party control and not handed over to the untrustworthy German Army. He was oblivious to the unsuitability of the Volkssturm's personnel for combat, not merely because of the ages involved but because of the general lack of training and equipment.
That unsuitability was obvious to others. German troops in the front lines were demoralized to find out that their young brothers, young sons, fathers, and even grandfathers were being stockpiled as cannon fodder. The fact that the only significant military effect the Volkssturm was likely to have was to make the Soviets expend more ammunition to slaughter them only added to the distress. Many German civilians were also deeply skeptical of the idea, though there were others who believed Nazi propaganda that the Volkssturm would help turn the tide of the war. For many people, it was easier to cling to transparent fantasies instead of accept the humiliating truth that they had been deluded.
* While the Red Army paused on the Oder, Allied leaders were converging on Yalta, a resort in the Crimea, for a conference to discuss the last actions of the war and what would come after.
US President Franklin Roosevelt arrived at Malta on the cruiser USS QUINCY on 2 February 1945, meeting up with Churchill and Anthony Eden. Roosevelt was 63 and in obviously poor health, and in fact he would be dead in a few months. His main advisor, Harry Hopkins, had long suffered from a digestive disease and seemed even more ill.
Roosevelt and Churchill and flew on to Yalta on 3 February. Stalin arrived the next morning, 4 February, having come by train since he hated to fly. He was in good health and confident, knowing perfectly well that he held trump cards in the game. The negotiations were superficially polite and formally emphasized the solidity of the alliance against Hitler, but after the tragedy of the Warsaw Uprising and other events of 1944 there was a strong undercurrent of suspicion.
The sessions began that afternoon and went on for the better part of a week. The first serious item on the agenda was a review of the strategic situation. The deputy chief of the Red Army general staff, General Aleksei Antonov, started off by delivering a report on the progress and current disposition of the Red Army on the Oder, concluding that the Germans were consolidating forces from other sectors to focus on the Soviet threat and that the final battle would be a tough one. In response, General George C. Marshall, US Army chief of staff, described plans in the West, stating that a drive on the Rhine would begin on 8 February. The Soviets were hoping that the Western Allies would also conduct a simultaneous offensive in northern Italy to keep the Germans from shifting forces from that front, but Marshall replied that the resources were being dedicated to the Rhine offensive.
Then the talks went on to greater matters. There was of course the issue of the future of Poland, a matter of major importance to the British. Stalin made it clear that he had no use for the London Poles, astoundingly accusing them of being collaborators with the Germans, and also that the prewar Polish border with the USSR was to be shifted to the west. The Soviets suggested that Poland's border with Germany could be shifted west as well to make up for the lost land. There was not much the British or Americans could do about it, and Roosevelt's chief military advisor, Admiral William D. Leahy, protested that the final agreement on the matter was impossibly vague and flexible. All the president could do was agree with Leahy, and say it was the best thing he could get under the circumstances.
Work on a plan for the occupation of Germany had been conducted by a "European Advisory Commission (EAC)", which first met in November 1944. The EAC's work was reviewed at Yalta, with Churchill insisting that the French have a part in the occupation, adding their weight in case the Americans decided to go back home. In fact, Roosevelt came right out and said that the American occupation of Germany would probably last only about two years. Witnesses saw Stalin's eyes light up at the remark.
The Soviets were also insistent that the Germans pay war reparations. This made British and American diplomats uneasy, since they remembered how the punitive peace after the First World War had led to another great war, but Stalin replied to objections with bottled-up fury that the Soviet Union had suffered greatly at German hands and that the reparations were only just. Again, there wasn't much the Western Allies could do about it.
The Americans had an axe to grind of their own, in the form of a request that the USSR declare war on Japan after the fall of Germany. The Americans feared that a US invasion of the Japanese main islands would be bloody and expensive, and wanted the Soviet Union to add to the pressure on the Japanese. Stalin was willing to help -- for a price, the USSR to obtain control of the Kurile Islands and half of Sakhalin Island north of Japan, and concessions in possessions relieved from the Japanese on the Asian mainland.
The Big Three signed a final document over lunch on 11 February. Churchill signed first, Stalin suggesting it would be appropriate since otherwise people might think he had run the conference. He might not have actually run it, but he certainly held the good cards and played them for all they were worth. It had been a confrontational meeting, more a session in adversarial negotiations than a conference of friends. At one point Roosevelt, ever the smooth talker, had tried to reduce the tensions by telling Stalin that he was known as "Uncle Joe" in the West. Stalin simply became offended and indignant: how dare anyone reduce a self-appointed demigod to the demeaning status of a kindly uncle!
* It is worth noting in this context that General Charles de Gaulle, the leader of newly liberated France, had visited Moscow in December 1944 to sign a Franco-Soviet friendship treaty. De Gaulle saw completely through Stalin, later describing him as a cunning tyrant with grand ambitions and dedicated to deception, and bluntly rejected as dishonorable Soviet arguments that France recognize the Lublin Committee as the legitimate government of Poland.
During the dinner that followed discussions, Kruschev later wrote that Stalin unusually got roaring drunk, making jokes about arresting various generals and officials, and even saying that he ought to send his own interpreter to the Gulag since "he knew too much." De Gaulle commented in his dry way that none of the guests at the dinner seemed very amused by these jokes.
* Hitler had promised that he had established a "Thousand Year Reich", but as 1944 drew to a close it was obvious that the end was near. Germany was in ruins, while the Western Allies closed in from the West and the Soviets closed in from the East.
With the Luftwaffe running out of gas and pilots, hopelessly outnumbered in the skies, British and American bombers pounded Germany's cities and industries into rubble. Fuel supplies dried up and fighter-bombers shot up anything that moved on the roads by daylight. Allied forces greatly outnumbered the Wehrmacht and were vastly better supplied, but Hitler refused to contemplate surrender. He threw whatever reinforcements he could scrape up to the East in hopes of blocking, or in his delusions even defeating, the Red Army.
Stalin himself gave Hitler a short breather, calling Zhukov from the Yalta Conference on 6 February 1945 and ordering that the drive on Berlin be postponed. The Red Army was to concentrate on East Prussia for the moment, driving north to clear out the threat to its flank before beginning the final push on Berlin. Stalin may have also wanted to prolong the war a little in hopes of improving the Soviet Union's standing at the end of the conflict.
In any case, Zhukov's First Belorussian Front turned right and drove towards Kolberg on the Baltic, while Rokossovsky's Second Belorussian Front moved west to meet them, surrounding Danzig along the way. To the south, Konev's First Ukrainian Front conducted a limited offensive to keep up the pressure along the line, with this thrust quickly reaching the Neisse. Konev's troops overran the industrial area of Silesia, capturing many factories and mines intact. It was a major economic disaster for the Reich.
The Germans in East Prussia had known their position was hopeless well before the February offensive, and many had been trying to escape. On 10 January, the Red Navy submarine S-13 had put three torpedoes into the WILHELM GUSTLOFF, loaded down with 7,000 refugees. Over 6,000 people died in the frigid waters of the Baltic. On 10 February, the S-13 also torpedoed the STEUBEN and sent it to the bottom, with 3,500 refugees on board. The submarine's captain, A.I. Marinesco, was recommended Hero of the Soviet Union, but he had a sexual liaison with a foreigner and was denied the award. He was finally given the HSU posthumously in 1990, at the last hour of the Soviet state.
The German 2nd Army was trapped with the civilians in Danzig. Hitler sacked its commander, Colonel General Walter Weiss, and on 12 March appointed General Dietrich von Saucken in his place. Saucken was something of an odd choice for Hitler, since the general was a thorough aristocrat -- he even wore a monacle -- and made no secret of his contempt for the low-bred Nazis. Hitler briefed Saucken and told him that he was to take orders from the Gauleiter in Danzig. Saucken replied stiffly: "I have no intention of placing myself under the orders of a Gauleiter."
Even Guderian, who had often argued with Hitler and was a witness to the scene, was shocked, all the more so because Saucken did not even bother to add "Mein Fuehrer" to the response. Even more astounding, Hitler meekly caved in: "All right, keep the command to yourself." Saucken flew to Danzig on 13 March and did everything he could to hold the line and get the civilians out. When the city finally fell on 28 March, the Red Army exceeded itself in the brutality inflicted on those who had not been able to flee. The fortified city of Koenigsberg held out until 10 April, the last of the "Baltic Balcony" to fall to the Red Army. As if to emphasize the crushing defeat, on 16 April a Soviet submarine sent the hospital ship GOYA to the bottom, along with most of the 7,000 refugees on board.
By this time, the Western Allies were across the Rhine and German resistance against them was fading out. German troops and civilians were fleeing West to surrender to the British and Americans. Himmler, discouraged by his lack of success, resigned his command of Army Group Vistula, though since he dared not make such a request of Hitler himself, Guderian suggested doing it for him. Himmler agreed and Guderian eagerly did him the favor. Command of Army Group Vistula fell to Colonel General Gotthardt Heinrici, then commander of the 1st Panzer Army, which was trying to hold the line against Konev. When Heinrici arrived, Himmler gave him a pompous and long-winded briefing, until news of another disaster on the front arrived. Himmler departed without further delay.
Many other Germans in uniform, fully aware of the treatment they would receive at the hands of Soviet troops on surrendering, were much more resolute than Himmler, willing to fight on to the last. They had no practical alternative. They were to be given little reward for their diligence. Despite the loyalty of the German people to their Fuehrer, he felt they had let him down. Following the Soviet capture of the resources of Silesia, on 19 March 1945 he issued the "Nero Befehl (Nero Order)", which dictated the widespread destruction of Germany's material resources. It was done to deny the enemy rewards for their conquests, as well as to punish the German people, who Hitler stated with mad arrogance had "proved themselves unworthy of me."
The despised Slavs had proven themselves stronger than the weakling Germans and so the Germans did not deserve to survive. To add to the arrogance, Martin Bormann had been sent off a few days earlier to the south to find places to stash Nazi loot. Fortunately, the Nero Order was not implemented with any great enthusiasm, and in fact in some cases German Army generals set up guards around important installations to prevent hardcore Nazis from destroying them. Germany was being thoroughly ruined by the simple violence of warfare; attempting to deliberately enhance the ruin was madness.
The clock was rapidly approaching midnight. On 7 March 1945, the Americans had captured a bridge over the Rhine at Remagen and were energetically using it to establish an ever-expanding foothold on the east bank, undeterred by frantic German counterattacks. Hitler got the news the next day and took it with a certain punch-drunk passivity, but the next day he was in a rage and ordered the execution of five German officers, much to the shock of the German Army.
The Fuehrer had ventured out of his bunker on 13 March to visit the Oder front, mostly for the benefit of Goebbels' cameramen. He did not review the troops, instead meeting with a group of officers, who were shocked at how white and unhealthy he looked. One officer commented on the Fuehrer's "glittering eyes, which reminded me of those of a snake." Hitler returned to his bunker and would not leave it again alive. There were heavy air raids on Berlin that day that killed thousands of civilians and left tens of thousands homeless.
* In the meantime, on 13 February 1945, the Red Army had taken Budapest after a 50-day siege. The Hungarians, tired of the war, had felt some relief when the Soviets approached, but Stalin's troops demonstrated much of the same inclination towards rape, looting, and brutality that they had put in practice elsewhere. The Hungarians quickly took a dislike to their "liberators". Churchill clearly saw his belief that the Soviets planned to take control of Eastern Europe coming true.
By this time, Stalin's attitude towards the Western Allies was drifting towards outright hostility, with Soviet officials being as uncooperative and rude as possible. In late March, Churchill pushed for a drive on Berlin; British Field Marshal Montgomery was enthusiastic about the idea. Churchill understood that the capture of Berlin would be a major propaganda victory, and would also give the Western Allies a better bargaining position with the Soviets after the war. The British made no secret of their interest in Berlin to the Soviets, and it was a matter of concern to Stalin.
US General Dwight Eisenhower, the military supreme commander in Europe, had other ideas. He felt that his primary responsibility was to minimize the losses among his troops -- an attitude that the Soviet high command would have found almost baffling -- and didn't believe that Berlin would be worth the casualties required to capture it. In particular, Eisenhower considered Montgomery's interest in the capture of Berlin to be motivated solely by Monty's well-established love for glory. Besides, according to the occupation plan agreed on at Yalta, much of the territory the Western Allies would capture in northern Germany would simply be handed over to the Soviets after the war anyway.
Eisenhower focused his armies on central Germany, with Leipzig and Dresden as their objectives. He wanted to capture what was left of Germany's heavy industries, and he also feared that the Nazi regime was preparing to make a fanatical last stand in the mountains of southeastern Germany and western Austria, an action that might prolong the war by a year or more. As far as the "AlpenFestung (Alpine Fortress)" or "National Redoubt" in the Alps was concerned, Eisenhower needn't have worried: it never really existed except as a fantasy of overblown Nazi propaganda. Some Allied intelligence officers suspected as much, but Hitler's foolish transfers of forces southward gave the idea some credibility.
Eisenhower sent a message to Stalin describing his strategy without consulting with the British ahead of time, and the result was a furious quarrel between British and American leadership. Eisenhower refused to change his decision, and the message was given to Stalin on 31 March by the head of the US military mission to the USSR, Major General John R. Deane. Stalin told Deane that he approved of Eisenhower's plans, and that the Red Army would drive southwest to link up with American and British forces.
* In reality Stalin, who lied without a second thought himself, assumed that Eisenhower was lying as well, and that the Western Allies were planning to double-cross him and take the city anyway. The American capture of the bridge at Remagen was almost as big a shock to Koba as it was to Hitler; Stalin hadn't expected the Western Allies to penetrate the Rhine barrier so quickly. He understood the propaganda value of Berlin as well as Churchill did, and decided that it was now time to move. Ironically and characteristically, Stalin had mercilessly badgered the Western Allies for years about a second front, and now that he had one, he was worried that his comrades-in-arms might use it to gain an advantage on him.
He called his generals to Moscow at the beginning of April. The offensive was to be conducted primarily by Zhukov's First Belorussian Front and Konev's First Ukrainian Front. Zhukov was nominally to be in overall command, but in reality Stalin blatantly played the two generals off against each other, first giving them bogus intelligence about Eisenhower's "plan" to capture Berlin to get them in a competitive mood, and then modifying the overall Red Army plan for the offensive so that, if circumstances justified it, Konev might take Berlin instead of Zhukov.
Despite the fact that Zhukov had interceded in Konev's behalf during the Battle of Moscow, the two generals disliked each other strongly. They were both burly men and aggressive, even ruthless, commanders, but that was about as far as the resemblance went. Zhukov was short, Konev tall; Zhukov was harsh with his own people, Konev paternalistic; Zhukov was coarse, Konev had an intellectual bent. Zhukov looked down on Konev because he came out of the ranks of the political commissars, not the regular military, and Konev predictably resented it. Konev also resented the fact that Zhukov was the object of such glorification by the state propaganda apparatus. The two set to work on organizing their parts in the offensive, pushing their staffs to the limit to get things in order as fast as possible.
Of course Stalin always had a devious agenda, and underlying the competition he had created between the two generals was his distrust of anyone who was a potential rival. Konev wasn't the only one who was irritated by Zhukov's prominence. Although Stalin called Zhukov to his face "my Suvorov", after the great Russian general who had defeated Napoleon, and Zhukov was one of the few people who would bluntly argue with Koba, there were stories that the normally controlled and calculating Stalin flew into rages at Zhukov's insufficiently subordinate attitude.
The NKVD had been quietly collecting evidence against Zhukov even as far back as the victory in Khalkin-Gol for the day that a case might be made against him. That would have to wait until Hitler was dragged through the streets of Moscow in chains or otherwise dealt with to Stalin's satisfaction. For the moment, Stalin needed Zhukov and continued to be friendly to his face.
The preparations for the offensive were massive and exhausting. The Germans had wrecked rail lines as they withdrew, and Polish trains had used a different track gauge anyway, so streams of American Studebaker 6x6 trucks brought up a flood of supplies of weapons, ammunition, food, and everything else needed for the battle. Zhukov accumulated seven million artillery shells for the opening phases alone. 40 engineering battalions worked night and day to put 25 bridges across the Oder to support Zhukov's drive. A detailed model of the city of Berlin was built at general headquarters, and all senior officers to be involved in the assault were put through a course with it. By mid-April, all was ready.