Berlin: The Downfall 1945

6. East and West

On the morning of 2 February, just as the first German counter-attacks were launched against the Oder bridgeheads, the USS Quincy reached Malta. ‘The cruiser which bore the President,’ wrote Churchill, ‘steamed majestically into the battle-scarred’ Grand Harbour of Valetta. He went on board to greet Roosevelt. Although Churchill did not acknowledge that the President was ill, his colleagues were shaken to see how exhausted he looked.

The reunion between the two men was friendly, if not affectionate, yet Churchill’s foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, was worried. Tension had continued to grow between the Western Allies over the invasion of Germany from the west. Now they were about to fly to Yalta in the Crimea to decide the post-war map of central Europe with Stalin. They were divided on this too, while the Soviet leader knew exactly what he wanted. Churchill and Eden were most concerned about the independence of Poland. Roosevelt’s main priority was the establishment of the United Nations for the post-war world.

In separate aircraft, the President and the Prime Minister took off in the early hours of 3 February. Escorted by long-range Mustang fighters, and with no cabin lights showing, they flew east towards the Black Sea, following a fleet of transport aeroplanes carrying the two delegations. They arrived after a flight of seven and a half hours at Saki near Eupatoria. There, they were met by Molotov and Vyshinsky, the former prosecutor at the show trials and now deputy foreign minister. Stalin, who suffered from a terrible fear of flying, did not arrive until the next morning, Sunday 4 February. He had travelled down from Moscow in his green railway carriage, still with some of its Art Nouveau decoration from Tsarist days.

The American chiefs of staff were housed in the Tsar’s former palace. General George C. Marshall found himself in the Tsarina’s bedroom, with a secret staircase allegedly used by Rasputin. Their British counterparts were in Prince Vorontsov’s Castle of Alupka, an extravagant mid-nineteenth-century mixture of Moorish and Scottish baronial. President Roosevelt, to save him any more journeys, was installed in the Livadia Palace, where the main discussions were to take place. So much had been wrecked during the fighting in the Crimea and the German withdrawal that major works, including complete replumbing, had been carried out at great speed by the Soviet authorities to make these palaces habitable. Amid the terrible war damage, no efforts were spared to entertain their guests with banquets of caviare and Caucasian champagne. Churchill could not resist calling this coast of ghostly summer palaces the ‘Riviera of Hades’. Not even he suspected that all their rooms had been bugged. The NKVD had also positioned directional microphones to cover the gardens.

Stalin visited Churchill that afternoon, keen to convey the impression that the Red Army could be in Berlin in no time. He then paid his respects to President Roosevelt. With Roosevelt, his manner became almost deferential and his version of events changed completely. Stalin now emphasized the strength of German resistance and the difficulty of crossing the River Oder. Roosevelt was certain that he, not Churchill, knew how to handle the Soviet leader and Stalin played up to this. Roosevelt believed that it was just a matter of winning Stalin’s trust, something which Churchill could never do. He even admitted openly his disagreements with the British over the strategy for the invasion of Germany. When he suggested that Eisenhower should have direct contact with the Stavka, Stalin encouraged the idea warmly. The Soviet leader saw the advantages of American frankness, while giving away little in return.

American leaders had another reason for not opposing Stalin. They did not yet know whether the atomic bomb would work, so they desperately wanted to bring Stalin into the war against Japan. It did not seem to occur to them that it was also very much to Stalin’s advantage to come in as a victor to the spoils after the fighting was virtually over.

At the first session, which began shortly afterwards, Stalin graciously proposed that President Roosevelt should chair the meetings. The Soviet leader was wearing the medal of Hero of the Soviet Union with his uniform of Marshal of the Soviet Union. The striped trousers were tucked into boots of soft Caucasian leather. These boots had built-up heels because he was extremely conscious of his short stature. Stalin also avoided bright lights wherever possible because they showed up the pockmarks on his face. All official portraits were heavily retouched to conceal such imperfections.

General Antonov, the Soviet chief of staff, gave an impressive-sounding account of the situation, but both American and British chiefs of staff sensed that it was short on detail. The British especially felt that information between allies appeared to be a one-way traffic. Antonov also claimed that the date of their great offensive had been brought forward to assist the Americans and British. General Marshall, for his part, underlined the effect of Allied bombing on German war industry, rail communications and fuel supplies, all of which had greatly assisted the Soviet Union in its recent successes. The mood of the meeting became almost ugly when Stalin deliberately twisted things said by Churchill, and Roosevelt had to intervene.

That evening at dinner, the generally amicable mood was again threatened by Soviet remarks demonstrating total contempt for the rights of small nations. Roosevelt, hoping to lighten the atmosphere, told Stalin that he was popularly known as ‘Uncle Joe’. Stalin, who had clearly never been informed of this by his own diplomats, was insulted by what he regarded as a vulgar and disrespectful nickname. This time, Churchill stepped in to rescue the situation with a toast to the Big Three — an expression of self-congratulation to which Stalin could not fail to respond. But he took this as another opportunity to re-emphasize the point that the Big Three would decide the fate of the world and that smaller nations should have no veto. Both Roosevelt and Churchill failed to see the implication.

The next morning, Monday 5 February, the American and British combined chiefs of staff met with the Stavka team led by General Antonov. The Stavka particularly wanted pressure to be exerted in Italy to prevent German divisions being withdrawn for use in Hungary. This was perfectly reasonable and logical in itself, but it may have also been part of the Soviet attempt to persuade the Americans and British to concentrate their efforts more to the south, well away from Berlin. But both General Marshall, the American army chief of staff, and Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, warned the Stavka quite openly that they could not prevent the movement of German formations from one front to another, apart from stepping up air raids on railways and communications centres.

The crux of the whole conference became apparent that afternoon and on the following day. The discussion began with the immediate post-war period and the treatment of defeated Germany. Victory was estimated to take place at any time from the summer onwards. Roosevelt talked about the European Advisory Commission and future zones of occupation. Stalin made it clear that he wanted Germany to be completely dismembered. Then Roosevelt announced without warning that United States forces would not remain in Europe for more than two years after Germany’s surrender. Churchill was privately appalled. This would only encourage Stalin to be more obdurate, and a war-ravaged Europe might well be too weak to resist Communist unrest.

Stalin also made clear that he intended to strip German industry as a down payment in kind towards the Soviet Union’s claim for $10 billion in reparations. He did not mention it at the conference, but government commissions composed of Soviet accountants looking very awkward in new colonels’ uniforms were closely following each army in its advance. Their task was ‘the systematic confiscation of German industry and wealth’. In addition, the NKVD group at each army headquarters had a team specialized in opening safes, preferably before a Soviet soldier tried to blast the door off with a captured panzerfaust, destroying everything inside. Stalin was determined to extract every ounce of gold he could.

The one issue which both Stalin and Churchill felt passionately about was Poland. The debate was not so much over the future frontiers of the country, but over the composition of its government. Churchill declared that a fully independent Poland, the very reason for which Great Britain had gone to war in September 1939, was a question of honour.

Stalin in his reply referred very obliquely to the secret clauses of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact, which had allowed the Soviet Union to invade and occupy the eastern part of Poland and the Baltic states while the Nazis seized the western half. ‘It is a question of honour,’ Stalin said, standing up, ‘because the Russians have committed many sins against the Poles in the past, and the Soviet government wishes to make amends.’ After this shameless opening, considering the Soviet oppression in Poland already under way, Stalin went to the heart of the matter. ‘It is also a question of security, because Poland presents the gravest of strategic problems for the Soviet Union. Throughout history, Poland has served as a corridor for enemies coming to attack Russia.’ He then argued that to prevent this, Poland had to be strong. ‘That is why the Soviet Union is interested in the creation of a mighty, free and independent Poland. The Polish question is a question of life and death for the Soviet state.’ The flagrant mutual contradiction of the last two sentences was obvious. Although it was never stated openly, the Soviet Union would accept nothing less than a totally subservient Poland as a buffer zone. Neither Churchill nor Roosevelt could fully appreciate the shock of the German invasion in 1941 and Stalin’s determination never to be surprised by another enemy. One could well argue that the origins of the Cold War lay in that traumatic experience.

Churchill nevertheless realized that he stood no chance when Stalin invoked the necessity of securing the Red Army’s lines of communications in the approaching battle for Berlin. The Soviet leader played his cards very cleverly. The provisional ‘Warsaw government’, as he insisted on calling it — the Americans and British still referred to these NKVD-controlled Communists as the ‘Lublin government’ — was in place and, he claimed, highly popular. As for democracy, he argued, the Polish government in exile in London possessed no more democratic support than De Gaulle enjoyed in France. One cannot know for sure whether Churchill properly decoded the unspoken message: you must not thwart me over Poland, because I have kept the French Communist Party under control. Your lines of communication have not been disturbed by revolutionary activity in France by the Communist-dominated resistance movement.

To rub in the point about respective spheres of influence, Stalin asked disingenuously how things were in Greece. The Soviet leader, on the basis of the so-called ‘percentage’ agreement of the previous October, apportioning spheres of influence in the Balkans, had undertaken not to cause trouble in Greece and to respect British control there. At Yalta, Stalin appears to have been signalling that both Poland and France should be considered as an extension of the percentage agreement, but the British Prime Minister failed to decipher the text. Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke suspected at the time that there was much that Churchill did not take in.

Stalin did not relax the pressure. He claimed that 212 Soviet soldiers had been killed by Poles. Churchill was forced to agree that attacks on the Red Army by the Polish non-Communist resistance, the Armia Krajowa, were utterly unacceptable. The Prime Minister did not know that the NKVD regiments in charge of rear area security were in most cases the aggressors, arresting any members of the underground and sometimes using torture to force them to reveal other names and the locations of their arms dumps. Roosevelt, clearly too ill and exhausted to intervene, could insist only on free elections in Poland, but that was a pious hope with the machinery entirely in Soviet hands. His chief aide, Harry Hopkins, estimated that Roosevelt had probably not taken in more than half of what was said.

Stalin was convinced that he had won. As soon as the Soviet delegates felt that there was no further challenge to their control of Poland, they suddenly dropped their opposition to the voting system proposed by the Americans for the United Nations. The other principal American concern, that Stalin would commit himself to the war against Japan within a short time of the defeat of Germany, was achieved at a private meeting on 8 February.

The Soviet leader was not gracious in victory. When Churchill expressed his fears at another meeting that such a massive change in Poland’s frontiers at Germany’s expense would cause an enormous shift in population, Stalin retorted that it would not be a problem. He spoke triumphantly of the huge wave of German refugees running away from the Red Army.

On 13 February, two days after the Yalta conference ended, Soviet might was reconfirmed with the fall of Budapest. The end of this terrible battle for the city was marked by an orgy of killing, looting, destruction and rape. Yet Hitler still wanted to counter-attack in Hungary with the Sixth SS Panzer Army. He hoped to smash Marshal Tolbukhin’s 3rd Ukrainian Front, but this was the compulsive gambler throwing on to the table the last few chips left over from the Ardennes.

That night, the British bombed Dresden. The following morning, which happened to be Ash Wednesday, the US Air Force followed in their path and also attacked several lesser targets. It was intended as a rapid fulfilment of the promise to the Stavka to hinder German troop movements by smashing rail communications. The fact that there were 180 V-bomb rocket attacks on England that week, the highest number so far, did little to soften the planners’ hearts. Dresden, the exquisitely beautiful capital of Saxony, had never been seriously bombed before. Dresdeners used to joke, half-believing it, that Churchill had an aunt living in the city and that was why they had been spared. But the raids on 13 and 14 February were merciless. The effect was in some ways comparable to the Hamburg fire-storm raid. But Dresden’s population was swollen by up to 300,000 refugees from the east. Several trains full of them were stuck in the main station. The tragedy was that instead of troops passing through Dresden to the front, as Soviet military intelligence had asserted, the traffic was civilian and going in the opposite direction.

Goebbels apparently shook with fury on hearing the news. He wanted to execute as many prisoners of war as the number of civilians killed in the attack. The idea appealed to Hitler. Such an extreme measure would tear up the Geneva Convention in the face of the Western Allies and force his own troops to fight to the end. But General Jodl, supported by Ribbentrop, Field Marshal Keitel and Grand Admiral Dönitz finally persuaded him that such an escalation of terror would turn out worse for Germany. Goebbels nevertheless extracted all he could from this ‘terror attack’. Soldiers with relatives in the city were promised compassionate leave. Hans-Dietrich Genscher remembers some of them returning from their visit. They were reluctant to talk about what they had seen.

On the Western Front, the Americans and the British had not been advancing anything like as rapidly as the Red Army. The battle for the Rhineland, which began during the talks at Yalta, was also slow and deliberate. Eisenhower was in no hurry. He thought that spring floodwater would make the Rhine impassable until the beginning of May. It was to take another six weeks before all Eisenhower’s armies were ready on the west bank of the Rhine. Only the miracle of capturing intact the Rhine bridge at Remagen allowed an acceleration of the programme.

Eisenhower was deeply irritated by the continuing British criticism of his methodical broad-front strategy. Churchill, Brooke and Field Marshal Montgomery all wanted a reinforced breakthrough to head for Berlin. Their reasons were mainly political. The capture of Berlin before the Red Army arrived would help to restore the balance of power with Stalin. Yet they also felt on military grounds that to seize the capital of the Reich would deal the greatest psychological blow to German resistance and shorten the war. British arguments for the single thrust into the heart of Germany, however, had not been helped by the insufferable Field Marshal Montgomery. At the end of the first week of January, he had tried to take far more credit for the defeat of the German offensive in the Ardennes than was his due. This crass and unpleasant blunder naturally infuriated American generals and deeply embarrassed Churchill. It certainly did not help persuade Eisenhower to allow Montgomery to lead a major push through northern Germany to Berlin.

Eisenhower, as supreme commander, continued to insist that it was not his job to look towards the post-war world. His task was to finish the war effectively with as few casualties as possible. He felt that the British were allowing post-war politics to rule military strategy. Eisenhower was genuinely grateful to Stalin for the effort made to advance the date of the January offensive, even if he was unaware of Stalin’s ulterior motive of securing Poland before the Yalta conference.

United States policy-makers simply did not wish to provoke Stalin in any way. John G. Winant, the United States ambassador in London, when discussing zones of occupation on the European Advisory Commission, even refused to raise the issue of a land corridor to Berlin in case it spoiled his relationship with his Soviet opposite number. The policy of appeasing Stalin came from the top and was widely accepted. Eisenhower’s political adviser, Robert Murphy, had been told by Roosevelt that ‘the most important thing was to persuade the Russians to trust us’. This could not have suited Stalin better. Roosevelt’s claim, ‘I can handle Stalin’, was part of what Robert Murphy acknowledged to be ‘the all-too-prevalent American theory’ that individual friendships can determine national policy. ‘Soviet policy-makers and diplomats never operate on that theory,’ he added. The American longing to be trusted by Stalin blinded them to the question of how far they should trust him. And this was a man whose lack of respect for international law had led him to suggest quite calmly that they should invade Germany via neutral Switzerland, thus ‘outflanking the West Wall’.

Soviet resentment was based on the fact that the United States and Britain had suffered so little in comparison. Nazi Germany also treated Allied prisoners in a totally different way from Red Army prisoners. A 1st Belorussian Front report on the liberation of a prisoner-of-war camp near Thorn underlined the contrast in fates. The appearance of the Americans, British and French inmates was healthy. ‘They looked more like people on holiday than prisoners of war,’ the report stated, ‘while Soviet prisoners were emaciated, wrapped in blankets.’ Prisoners from the Western Allied countries did not have to work, they were allowed to play football and they received food parcels from the Red Cross. Meanwhile, in the other part of the camp, ‘17,000 Soviet prisoners had been killed or died from starvation or illness. The “special regime” for Soviet prisoners consisted of 300 grams of ersatz bread and 1 litre of soup made from rotten mangelwurzels per day. Healthy prisoners were made to dig trenches, the weak ones were killed or buried alive.’ British prisoners there in Stalag XXA insist that it was far from a holiday camp and that their rations were in fact no better than those given to the Soviet prisoners, but they had been saved from starvation by Red Cross parcels.

They were guarded by ‘traitors’ from the Red Army, recruited with the promise of better rations. These volunteers treated ‘Soviet prisoners of war with more cruelty than the Germans’. Some of the guards were said to have been Volga Germans. They ordered prisoners to strip and set dogs on them. The Germans had apparently carried out ‘a massive propaganda’ attempt to persuade prisoners to join the ROA, General Vlasov’s army of former Soviet soldiers in Wehrmacht uniform. ‘Many Ukrainians and Uzbeks sold themselves to the Germans,’ stated a prisoner. He was described as an ‘ex-Party member’ and ‘former senior lieutenant’. This was because members of the Red Army were stripped of all status simply for having allowed themselves to be taken prisoner.

The punishments inflicted on Soviet prisoners included forcing them to do knee-bends for up to seven hours, ‘which completely crippled the victim’. They were also made to run up and down stairs past guards armed with rubber truncheons on every landing. In another camp, wounded officers were placed under cold showers in winter and left to die of hypothermia. Soviet soldiers were subjected to the ‘saw-horse’, the eighteenth-century torture of strapping a prisoner astride a huge trestle. Some were made to run as live targets for shooting practice by SS guards. Another punishment was known as ‘Achtung!’ A Soviet prisoner was made to strip and kneel in the open. Handlers with attack dogs waited on either side. The moment he stopped shouting, ‘Achtung! Achtung! Achtung!’ the dogs were set on him. Dogs were also used when prisoners collapsed after being forced to do ‘sport marches’, goose-stepping in rapid time. It may have been news of these sorts of punishment which inspired similar practices against German prisoners taken by Soviet troops in their recent advances. An escaped British prisoner of war, a fighter pilot, picked up by a unit of the 1st Ukrainian Front and taken along, saw a young SS soldier forced to play a piano for his Russian captors. They made it clear in sign language that he would be executed the moment he stopped. He managed to play for sixteen hours before he collapsed sobbing on the keyboard. They slapped him on the back, then dragged him out and shot him.

The Red Army advanced into German territory with a turbulent mixture of anger and exultation. ‘Everybody seems to have German harmonicas,’ noted Grossman, ‘a soldier’s instrument because it is the only one possible to play on a rattling vehicle or cart.’ They also mourned their comrades. Yakov Zinovievich Aronov, an artilleryman, was killed near Königsberg on 19 February. Shortly before his death he wrote a typical soldier’s letter home: ‘We are beating and destroying the enemy, who is running back to his lair like a wounded beast. I live very well and I’m alive and I’m healthy. All my thoughts are about beating the enemy and coming home to you all.’ Another of his letters was much more revealing, because it was to a fellow soldier who would understand. ‘I love life so much, I have not yet lived. I am only nineteen. I often see death in front of me and I struggle with it. I fight and so far I am winning. I am an artillery reconnaissance man, and you can imagine what it is like. To make a long story short, I very often correct the fire of my battery and only when shells hit the target, I feel joy.’

Aronov was killed ‘one foggy Prussian morning’, wrote his closest friend to the dead boy’s sister Irina. The two of them had fought together all the way from Vitebsk to Königsberg. ‘So, Ira, the war has separated many friends and a lot of blood has been shed, but we comrades in arms are taking vengeance on Hitler’s serpents for our brothers and friends, for their blood.’ Aronov’s body was buried by his comrades ‘on the edge of the forest’. Presumably its site was marked like others by a stick with a small bit of red rag tied to it. If refound by the pioneers responsible, it would be replaced by a small wooden plaque. There were too many bodies spread too widely for reburying in cemeteries.

Red Army soldiers were also marked by their encounters with slave workers, attempting to return home. Many were peasant women with knotted headkerchiefs covering their foreheads and wearing improvised puttees for warmth. Captain Agranenko, the dramatist, encountered a cart full of women in East Prussia. He asked who they were. ‘We are Russian. Russian,’ they answered, overjoyed to hear a friendly voice. He shook hands with each one of them. An old woman suddenly began to cry. ‘It is the first time in three years that someone has shaken my hand,’ she explained.

Agranenko also encountered ‘a beauty from the region of Orel called Tatyana Khilchakova’. She was returning home with a two-month-old baby. In the German camp for slave labourers she had met a Czech and fallen in love with him. They had exchanged marriage vows, but when the Red Army arrived, her Czech had immediately volunteered to fight the Germans. ‘Tatyana does not know his address. He does not know hers. And it is unlikely that the war will ever throw them together again.’ Perhaps, even more unfortunately, she would probably be made to suffer on her return home to Orel for having had relations with a foreigner.

The chief concern for the Stavka at this time continued to be the wide gap across the ‘Baltic balcony’ between Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front and the left flank of Rokossovsky’s 2nd Belorussian Front. On 6 February, Stalin had rung Zhukov from Yalta. He asked what he was doing. Zhukov replied that he was in a meeting of army commanders to discuss the advance on Berlin from the new Oder bridgeheads. Stalin retorted that he was wasting his time. They should consolidate on the Oder, and then turn north to join up with Rokossovsky.

Chuikov, the commander of the 8th Guards Army, who appears to have resented Zhukov since Stalingrad, was contemptuous that Zhukov did not argue forcefully for a push on Berlin. The bitter debate continued well into the post-war years. Chuikov argued that a rapid push at the beginning of February would have caught Berlin undefended. But Zhukov and others felt that with exhausted troops and serious supply shortages, to say nothing of the threat of a counter-attack from the north on their exposed right flank, the risk was far too great.

In East Prussia, meanwhile, German forces were contained but not yet defeated. The remains of the Fourth Army, having failed to break out at the end of January, was squeezed in the Heiligenbeil Kessel, with its back to the Frisches Haff. Its main artillery support came from the heavy guns of the cruisers Admiral Scheer and Lützow, firing from out in the Baltic across the sandbar of the Frische Nehrung and the frozen lagoon.

The remnants of the Third Panzer Army in Königsberg had been cut off from the Samland Peninsula, but on 19 February, a joint attack from both sides created a land corridor which was then bitterly defended. The evacuation of civilians and wounded from the small port of Pillau at the tip of the Samland Peninsula was intensified, but many civilians feared to leave by ship after the torpedo attacks on the Wilhelm Gustloff and other refugee ships. In the early hours of 12 February, the hospital ship General von Steuben was torpedoed after leaving Pillau with 2,680 wounded. Almost all were drowned.

The Second Army, meanwhile, had been forced back towards the lower Vistula and its estuary, defending Danzig and the port of Gdynia. It formed the left flank of Himmler’s Army Group Vistula. In the centre, in eastern Pomerania, a new Eleventh SS Panzer Army was being formed. Himmler’s right flank on the Oder consisted of the remnants of General Busse’s Ninth Army, which had been so badly mauled in western Poland.

Himmler seldom ventured out of his luxurious special train, the Steiermark, which he had designated his ‘field headquarters’. The Reichsführer SS now realized that the responsibilities of military command were rather greater than he had imagined. His ‘insecurity as a military leader,’ wrote Colonel Eismann, ‘made him incapable of a determined presentation of the operational situation to Hitler, let alone of asserting himself. Himmler used to return from the Führer situation conference a nervous wreck. Staff officers received little pleasure from the paradox that the feared Himmler should be so fearful. His ‘servile attitude’ towards Hitler and his fear of admitting the disastrous state of his forces ‘caused great damage and cost a vast amount of unnecessary blood’.

Himmler, seeking refuge in the Führer’s own aggressive clichés, talked of more counter-attacks. Following the Demmlhuber débâcle, Himmler set his mind on establishing the so-called Eleventh SS Panzer Army. In fact the whole of Army Group Vistula in the early days contained only three under-strength panzer divisions. At best, the formations available constituted a corps, ‘but panzer army’, observed Eismann, ‘has a better ring to it’. Himmler had another motive, however. It was to promote Waffen SS officers on the staff and in field command. Obergruppenführer Steiner was named as its commander. Steiner, an experienced soldier, was certainly a much better choice than other senior Waffen SS officers. But he did not have an easy task.

General Guderian, determined to keep a corridor open to the edge of East Prussia, argued at a situation conference in the first week of February that an ambitious operation was needed. He was even more outspoken than usual that day, having drunk a certain amount at an early lunch with the Japanese ambassador. Guderian wanted a pincer movement from the Oder south of Berlin and an attack down from Pomerania to cut off Zhukov’s leading armies. To assemble enough troops, more of the divisions trapped uselessly in Courland and elsewhere needed to be brought back by sea and the offensive in Hungary postponed. Hitler refused yet again.

‘You must believe me,’ Guderian persisted, ‘when I say it is not just pig-headedness on my part that makes me keep on proposing the evacuation of Courland. I can see no other way left to us of accumulating reserves, and without reserves we cannot hope to defend the capital. I assure you I am acting solely in Germany’s interests.’ Hitler began trembling in anger as he jumped to his feet. ‘How dare you speak to me like that?’ he shouted. ‘Don’t you think I’m fighting for Germany? My whole life has been one long struggle for Germany!’ Colonel de Maizière, the new operations officer at Zossen, had never seen such a row and stood there shocked and afraid for the chief of staff. To bring an end to Hitler’s frenzy, Goring led Guderian out of the room to find some coffee while everyone calmed down.

Guderian’s main fear was that the Second Army, trying to maintain a link between East Prussia and Pomerania, was in danger of being cut off. He therefore argued instead for a single attack southwards from the ‘Baltic balcony’. This attack on Zhukov’s right flank would also deter the Soviets from trying to attack Berlin immediately. On 13 February, a final conference on the operation was held in the Reich Chancellery. Himmler, as commander-in-chief of Army Group Vistula, was present, and so was Oberstgruppenführer Sepp Dietrich. Guderian also brought his extremely capable deputy, General Wenck. Guderian made plain right from the start that he wanted the operation to start in two days’ time. Himmler objected, saying that not all the fuel and ammunition had arrived. Hitler supported him and soon the Führer and his army chief of staff were having another row. Guderian insisted that Wenck should direct the operation.

‘The Reichsführer SS is man enough to carry out the attack on his own,’ Hitler said.

‘The Reichsführer SS has neither the requisite experience nor a sufficiently competent staff to control the attack single-handed. The presence of General Wenck is therefore essential.’

‘I don’t permit you,’ Hitler shouted, ‘to tell me that the Reichsführer SS is incapable of performing his duties.’

The argument raged for a long time. Hitler was literally raving in anger and screaming. Guderian claims to have glanced up at a helmeted portrait of Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor, and wondered what he thought of what was happening in the country he had helped to create. To Guderian’s surprise, Hitler suddenly stopped his pacing up and down and told Himmler that General Wenck would join his headquarters that night and direct the offensive. He then sat down again abruptly and smiled at Guderian. ‘Now please continue with the conference. The general staff has won a battle this day.’ Guderian ignored Keitel’s remonstrances later in the anteroom that he might have caused the Führer to suffer a stroke. He feared that his limited triumph might be short-lived.

On 16 February, the Pomeranian offensive, known as the Stargard tank battle, began under Wenck’s direction. Over 1,200 tanks had been allocated, but the trains to transport them were lacking. Even an under-strength panzer division needed fifty trains to move its men and vehicles. Far more serious was the shortage of ammunition and fuel, of which there were enough for only three days of operations. The lesson of the Ardennes offensive had not been learned.

Army staff officers had intended to give the offensive the codename ‘Husarenritt’, or Hussar ride, which in itself seemed to acknowledge that this could be no more than a raid. But the SS insisted on a much more dramatic name: ‘Sonnenwende’, or solstice. In the event it was neither a Hussar ride — a sudden thaw meant that the armoured vehicles were soon bogged down in the mud — nor a solstice, since it changed very little. The Wehrmacht could ill afford the heavy loss of tanks when the 2nd Guards Tank Army counter-attacked.

The highest-ranking casualty was General Wenck, who, driving back to his headquarters from briefing the Führer on the night of 17 February, fell asleep at the wheel and was badly hurt. He was replaced by General Krebs, a clever staff officer who had been military attaché in Moscow before Operation Barbarossa. The attempt to force back the Soviet counter-attack, however, had to be abandoned after two days. All that can be said in favour of the offensive is that it bought time. The Kremlin became convinced that a quick dash to Berlin was out of the question until the Pomeranian coastline was secured.

Hitler’s attempts to designate ‘fortress’ towns and to refuse to allow the evacuation of encircled troops, were part of a suicidal pattern of enforced sacrifice and useless suffering. He knew that they were doomed because the Luftwaffe lacked the fuel and aircraft to supply them, and yet his policy deprived Army Group Vistula of experienced troops.

Königsberg and Breslau held out, but other towns designated as fortresses or breakwaters by Hitler soon fell. In southern Pomerania, Schneidemühl, the smallest and the least well defended, fell on 14 February after a desperate defence. For once, even Hitler had no complaints and awarded Knight’s Crosses to both the commander and the second-in-command. Four days later, on 18 February, just as Operation Sonnenwende became bogged down in the mud, General Chuikov gave the signal for the storming of the fortress of Poznan. His 7th Department, as at Stalingrad, had preceded the bombardment with loudspeaker programmes of lugubrious music interspersed with messages that surrender was the only way to save your life and return home. The Germans were told that they had no hope of escape because they were now over 200 kilometres behind the front line.

Siege artillery had begun the softening-up process nine days before, but by the morning of 18 February, 1,400 guns, mortars and katyusha launchers were ready for the four-hour bombardment. Storm groups fought into the fortress, whose superstructure had been crushed by explosive fire. When resistance from a building continued, a 203mm howitzer was brought up and blasted the walls over open sights. Flamethrowers were used and explosive charges dropped down ventilation shafts. German soldiers who tried to surrender were shot by their own officers. But the end was imminent. On the night of 22–23 February, the commandant, Major General Ernst Gomell, spread out the swastika flag on the floor of his room, lay down on it and shot himself. The remnants of the garrison capitulated.

The siege of Breslau was to be even more prolonged: the city held out even after Berlin had fallen. As a result it was one of the most terrible of the war. The fanatical Gauleiter Hanke was determined that the capital of Silesia should remain unconquered. It was he who used loudspeaker vans to order women and children to flee the city in late January. Those who froze to death were entirely his responsibility.

The city had good stocks of food but little ammunition. The attempts to drop ammunition by parachute were a terrible waste of Luftwaffe resources. Colonel General Schörner, the commander-in-chief of Army Group Centre, then decided to send part of the 25th Parachute Regiment at the end of February to strengthen the garrison. The regimental commander protested strenuously that there was no landing zone, but on 22 February the battalion boarded Junkers 52 transports at Jüterbog, south of Berlin. At midnight the aircraft approached Breslau. ‘Over the city,’ one of the paratroopers wrote later, ‘we could see extensive fires and we encountered heavy anti-aircraft fire.’ A hit on the radio left them out of contact with ground control and they landed at an airfield near Dresden. Another attempt was made two nights later. The Soviet flak was even more intense as they circled the burning city for twenty minutes, trying to find a landing place. Three of the aircraft were lost: one of them crashed into a factory chimney.

Hanke’s disciplinary measures, backed by General Schörner’s policy of ‘strength through fear’, were terrible. Execution was arbitrary. Even ten-year-old children were put to work under Soviet air and artillery attack to clear an air strip within the city. Any attempt to surrender by those who sought to ‘preserve their pitiful lives’ would be met by a death sentence instantly carried out. ‘Decisive measures’ would also be taken against their families. Schörner argued that ‘almost four years of an Asiatic war’ had changed the soldier at the front completely: ‘It has hardened him and fanaticized him in the struggle against the Bolsheviks… The campaign in the east has developed the political soldier.’

Stalin’s boast at Yalta that the populations of East Prussia and Silesia had fled was not yet true. All too many were still trapped in besieged cities. German civilians in East Prussia also continued to suffer wherever they were, whether in Königsberg and the Heiligenbeil Kessel, attempting to leave the port of Pillau by ship, escaping on foot to the west or remaining at home. The February thaw meant that the ice of the Frisches Haff could be crossed only on foot and not by cart. The exit to Danzig, Pomerania and the west still remained open, but everyone realized that it was only a matter of time before the 1st Belorussian Front cut through to the Baltic.

Beria was informed by a senior SMERSH officer that the ‘significant part of the population of East Prussia’ which had fled into Königsberg had found that there was little room for them and even less food. They were lucky if they received 180 grams of bread a day. ‘Starved women with children are dragging themselves along the road’ in the hope that the Red Army might feed them. From these civilians, Red Army intelligence heard that ‘the morale of the Königsberg garrison is severely shaken. New general orders have been issued that any German male who does not report for frontline service will be shot on the spot… Soldiers put on civilian clothes and desert. On 6 and 7 February, the bodies of eighty German soldiers were piled up at the northern railway station. A placard was erected above them: “They were cowards but died just the same.”’

After the failure of Operation Sonnenwende, Danzig was increasingly threatened. The Kriegsmarine made great efforts to rescue as many wounded and civilians as possible. In the course of a single day, 21 February, 51,000 were brought out. The Nazi authorities estimated that only 150,000 remained to be evacuated, but a week later they found that Danzig now had a population of 1.2 million, of whom 530,000 were refugees. Greater efforts were made. On 8 March thirty-four trains of cattle trucks full of civilians left Pomerania for Mecklenburg, west of the Oder. Hitler wanted to move 150,000 refugees into Denmark. Two days later instructions were issued: ‘The Führer has ordered that from now on Copenhagen is to become a target sanctuary.’ Also on 10 March, the estimated running total of German refugees from the eastern provinces rose to 11 million people.

Yet even while the city of Danzig swarmed with frightened refugees desperate to escape, vile work continued in the Danzig Anatomical Medical Institute. After the Red Army captured the city a special commission was sent there to investigate the manufacture of soap and leather from ‘corpses of citizens of the USSR, Poland and other countries killed in German concentration camps’. In 1943 Professor Spanner and Assistant Professor Volman had begun to experiment. They then built special facilities for production. ‘The examination of the premises of the Anatomical Institute revealed 148 human corpses which were stored for the production of soap of which 126 were male corpses, eighteen female and four children. Eighty male corpses and two female corpses were without heads. Eighty-nine human heads were also found.’ All corpses and heads were stored in metal containers in an alcohol-carbolic solution. It appears that most of the corpses came from Stutthof concentration camp, near the city. ‘The executed people whose corpses were used for making soap were of different nationalities, but mostly Poles, Russians and Uzbeks.’ The work evidently received official approval, considering the high rank of its visitors. ‘The Anatomical Institute was visited by the Minister of Education Rust and Minister of Health Care Konti. Gauleiter of Danzig Albert Förster visited the institute in 1944, when soap was already being produced. He examined all the premises of the Anatomical Institute and I think that he knew about the production of soap from human corpses.’ The most astonishing aspects of this appalling story are that nothing was destroyed before the Red Army arrived and that Professor Spanner and his associates never faced charges after the war. The processing of corpses was not a crime.

Stutthof camp contained mainly Soviet prisoners and a number of Poles, a mixture of soldiers and Jews. Some 16,000 prisoners died in the camp from typhoid in six weeks. As the Red Army approached, prisoners were ordered to eliminate all traces. The crematorium was blown up and ten barrack blocks in which Jews had been kept were burned down. Apparently ordinary German soldiers were made to take part in the executions of Red Army prisoners of war and Soviet civilians.

Whether prompted by fear of retribution for war crimes or fear of the Bolsheviks and slave labour in Siberia, the exhausted Wehrmacht still marched and fought. ‘The Germans have not yet lost hope,’ stated a French intelligence analysis that February, ‘they don’t dare to.’ Soviet officers put it slightly differently: ‘Morale is low but discipline is strong.’