Slaughter at Halbe

ONE Preparing for ‘Operation Berlin’ ^{21 APRIL 1999}

When the Soviets launched Operation Berlin on 16 April 1945, Marshal Georgi Konstantinovitch Zhukov’s 1st Byelorussian Front opposite Berlin, and Marshal Ivan Stepanovitch Koniev’s 1st Ukrainian Front further south, faced the German 9th Army on the Oder River and 4th Panzer Army on the Neisse River respectively in overwhelming force.

For this final assault on the Third Reich, the Soviets had mustered the last of their manpower to fill the establishments of these two army groups and to provide them with all the equipment and supplies they needed. Additionally, substantial artillery formations from the Stavka (General Staff) Reserve had been placed at their disposal for the initial breakthrough battle. Excluding reserves and rear area troops, these forces amounted to:[1]

In comparison, the opposing 9th Army could only muster some 200,000 men, 512 tanks and self-propelled guns (SPGs) of all kinds, and 2,625 artillery pieces, while air support was reduced to a minimum for lack of fuel for the aircraft available.

The statistics were such that the outcome of the Berlin Operation could be regarded as a foregone conclusion by the Soviets, but with different effects at either end of the rank structure. For the leadership, and that meant Josef Stalin, this entailed thinking and playing one step ahead of imminent victory, and for the rank and file seeing the war out, not taking unnecessary risks in combat, and making the most of their opportunities when not in action.

The attitude of the Soviet soldier since crossing the German frontier had proved a serious problem for the command. Encouraged to take revenge on the Germans by the Soviet press and radio for the outrages committed in the Soviet Union, they had indulged in endless atrocities of murder, rape, looting, arson and wilful damage, bringing about a serious collapse in army discipline. Consequently, the political departments in the command structure had a difficult task in motivating and inspiring the troops, apart from the necessary reimposition of discipline.

For Stalin the war had served to reinforce his position as leader of his country, in which role he would brook no potential rival, but it was inevitable during the course of the war that certain of his generals should have attracted public attention, and he now saw the opportunity to cut them down to size, the rival Marshals Zhukov and Koniev in particular. Zhukov did not like or particularly trust Koniev, the former political commissar turned professional soldier, and the latter’s brief experience under Zhukov’s command had led him to dislike Zhukov intensely. As Boris Nicolaevsky wrote in his book Power and the Soviet Elite, Stalin, with his great talent for exploiting human weaknesses, had:

In fact Zhukov posed no threat to Stalin, whose authority Zhukov accepted without question, whether he thought Stalin right or wrong in his military decisions, in the same spirit in which Zhukov demanded total obedience from his own subordinates. Yet he had reason to be apprehensive for, as early as 1942, Stalin had sought some means of curbing Zhukov, tasking Viktor Abakumov, Head of the Special Department of the Ministry of the Interior (later to become SMERSH) with this. Although officially subordinate to Lavrenti Beria, Abakumov had direct access to Stalin, and began by arresting Zhukov’s former Chief of Operations with the Western Front in an unsuccessful attempt to gain incriminating evidence. Although Zhukov was nominally Deputy Supreme Commander of the Soviet Armed Forces, Stalin retained all the power for himself. By the autumn of 1944 Stalin was becoming ever more openly critical of the directions Zhukov was giving to his subordinate fronts on behalf of Stavka, this time tasking Nikolai Bulganin, then Deputy Commissar for Defence, with finding some error or omission with which Zhukov could be charged. Eventually two artillery manuals were found that Zhukov had personally approved, without first clearing them with Stavka. An order was then distributed throughout the upper echelons of the command structure, openly warning Zhukov not to be hasty when serious questions were being decided. Zhukov’s appointment as commander of the 1st Byelorussian Front then followed as a humiliating demotion, and placed him on a par with Koniev commanding the 1st Ukrainian Front. Consequently, Zhukov was now in a far from enviable position, being under constant threat of arrest.

With Zhukov’s East Pomeranian and Koniev’s Silesian clearance operations successfully completed, Stalin summoned them to Moscow to finalize the planning for the capture of Berlin. The matter was pressing because, despite the agreements reached at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 about the zoning of postwar Germany, the Soviet leaders generally expected that the Western Allies would try to get to Berlin ahead of them. The Soviets were fully aware of the political significance of taking the German capital, a point that General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander in the West, and his superior, General George C. Marshall in Washington, failed to grasp, despite urging from their British allies. On 28 March Eisenhower signalled Stalin to the effect that he had decided to disregard Berlin and direct his main thrust on the Erfurt–Leipzig–Dresden area and the mythical Alpine Redoubt.[3] Stalin had promptly and deceitfully replied approving these proposals and announcing his own intentions of a main thrust on Dresden with only subsidiary forces directed on Berlin. From German signal traffic the Western Allies had been alerted to the imminence of the Soviet offensive and had pressed Stalin for details, but it was not until the eve of the attack that he was to divulge the date to them, again emphasizing quite untruthfully that his main thrust would be in the south.[4]

General Sergei M. Shtemenko, Chief of the Operations Department of the Soviet General Staff, wrote about the preliminary planning for Operation Berlin:

Zhukov arrived in Moscow on 29 March and saw Stalin that evening. Stalin gave him two days to sort out the final details of his plans with the General Staff. He and Koniev were to present their plans for Stavka approval on 1 April. Shtemenko then went on to describe the events of the 1945 Easter weekend in Moscow:

In his memoirs, Koniev wrote of this event:

So this operation was to become not only a race against time to beat the Western Allies to Berlin, but also a race between the front commanders for the glory of taking the enemy capital, and within the capital what to them was the symbolic Reichstag building. Although it had been burnt out twelve years previously and remained a desolate shell, its significance to the Soviets was akin to that of the Kremlin in their own country, as the centre of Nazi power.

Instead of the usual three to four months to prepare for an operation of this magnitude, the Soviets could now only allow themselves two weeks.

Stalin signed the directive approving Zhukov’s plans for the 1st Byelorussian Front’s operation on the night of 1 April and Koniev’s the following day. The directive for Marshal Konstantin K. Rokossovsky’s 2nd Byelorussian Front was not issued for another week, for he was still heavily engaged in mopping up the German forces remaining in East Prussia and was not expected to launch his part of the Berlin operation against the 3rd Panzer Army north of Berlin until 20 April.[8]

Zhukov’s orders gave him the primary task of taking Berlin by 21 April and pushing on to the Elbe by 1 May. Koniev would support the Berlin operation by destroying the German forces to the south of the city, and would have the secondary task of taking Dresden and Leipzig, both important industrial cities in the future Soviet Zone of Occupation. The 2nd Byelorussian Front would engage the German forces north of the capital, while other fronts further south would maintain pressure on the Germans to prevent the redeployment of strategic reserves to the Berlin area.[9]

The main problem for Zhukov in the breakthrough battle would be the clearing of the commanding Seelow Heights. He proposed doing this with a simultaneous attack from his bridgehead in the Oderbruch valley bottom by four reinforced combined-arms formations to clear breaches in the defences. This would enable his two tank armies to pass through and take Berlin in a pincer movement. The 2nd Guards Tank Army would penetrate the heart of Berlin from the north-east, while 1st Guards Tank Army would bypass Berlin and Potsdam to the south, pushing on to the west. A further two armies would conduct river crossings across the Alte Oder and Oder, press on to cover the northern flank and block off Berlin from the west. Meanwhile, 69th Army would cover the southern flank of the main attack while containing the Frankfurt-an-der-Oder garrison in conjuction with 33rd Army. The latter, with 2nd Guards Cavalry Corps, would break out of its own bridgehead, and together these two armies would push westward along the line of the autobahn with the objectives of Fürstenwalde and eventually Brandenburg. (This move, in conjunction with that of 1st Guards Tank Army, could also be interpreted as intended to forestall any attempt by Koniev to break into the city from the south.) The 3rd Army would form the front’s second echelon, and 7th Guards Cavalry Corps the front reserve.[10]

However, as he reveals in his memoirs, Koniev was determined to get into Berlin, even though the GHQ directive for his front was somewhat vague on this point, reading:

In his own orders to his front, Koniev inserted between the last two sentences of the above text: ‘to bear in mind the possibility of using some of our forces of the right flank of the front to help the troops of the 1st Byelorussian Front in capturing the city of Berlin.’ As he went on to explain in his memoirs:

In contrast to Stalin in the splendour of the Kremlin, Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the Third Reich and Supreme Commander of the German Armed Forces, was exercising his authority from a new command bunker beneath the Old Chancellery building in the Wilhelmstrasse, into which he had moved on 16 January. He now lived and worked in an oppressive atmosphere of noisy air-conditioning and sweating concrete walls, with no distinction between night and day. The Führerbunker also suffered the serious defect of being inadequately equipped with communications facilities for its role. This was in part due to scale, for accommodation was extremely cramped in the Führerbunker itself, although more space could have been made available in the bomb-proof shelters beneath the New Chancellery building next door. However, the only communications facilities installed in the Führerbunker were a one-man switchboard, one radio transmitter and a radio telephone, which was dependent upon an aerial suspended from a balloon.[13]

The German Army’s once powerful General Staff had been utterly broken by the purge following the unsuccessful assassination attempt against Hitler of 20 July 1944, and its representatives in Hitler’s entourage were now mere sycophants. Permanently with Hitler in the Führerbunker was Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, nominal Chief of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW – Armed Forces GHQ) with his headquarters in Berlin-Dahlem, but in practice acting as Hitler’s personal chief of staff and issuing orders in the Führer’s name. The OKW Chief of Staff, Colonel-General Alfred Jodl, and the Chief of Staff of the Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH – Army GHQ), General of Infantry Hans Krebs, were obliged to spend most of their time shuttling back and forth between the Führerbunker conferences and the secret wartime headquarters in the vast bunkers known as Maybach I and II respectively, some thirty kilometres south of the city at Zossen–Wunsdorf.[14]

One has only to read Colonel-General Heinz Guderian’s book, Panzer Leader, to realize how intolerable Hitler’s conduct as a commander was towards the General Staff and what pressure officers were placed under as a result of this. The essence of the problem lay in Hitler’s Führer-system of unquestioning obedience to orders clashing with the General Staff’s system of mutual trust and exchange of ideas, against a background of Hitler’s class consciousness and genuine distrust of the General Staff following the failed putsch of 20 July 1944.[15]

Hitler’s system of leadership was reflected in the state and composition of the German armed forces. One particularly confusing aspect was the use of corps and army headquarters taken out of reserve to command new formations to which they automatically gave their titles, irrespective of their composition or function. Thus, for example, V SS Mountain Corps commanded only one Waffen-SS formation and no mountain troops, and XI SS Panzer Corps consisted primarily of ordinary infantry units.[16]

The basic framework of the German ground forces was still that of the German Army, most commonly (though not strictly correctly) known by the overall title of the Wehrmacht. However, after the abortive coup of 20 July 1944, the Army had been seriously weakened by the great purge of officers that followed and by the Nazi leaders’ distrust of the survivors. Political officers (NS-Führungsoffiziere) had been appointed to all units and formation headquarters for the purpose of promoting the Nazi spirit and to spy on possible dissidents.

Under the operational command of the Wehrmacht, although technically an entirely separate organization, was Heinrich Himmler’s Waffen-SS, consisting of Panzer (armoured), Panzergrenadier (motorized infantry), cavalry and mountain formations, as well as foreign volunteer elements such as the 23rd SS Panzergrenadier Division Nederland. However, as a result of hard usage most of these formations were now drastically reduced in strength. Despite their elitism, by 1945 the various Waffen-SS units and formations were fully integrated into the Army’s operational system.

Drastic measures had had to be taken to man the defences along the Eastern Front. Marsch (field replacement) battalions had been raised from police, fire brigade, customs and border guard resources, equipped with small arms and sent into combat to serve under their own officers, while sailors and airmen with little or no field training and inadequate equipment were drafted as infantry. Units of the Volkssturm (Home Guard) had also been used to bolster some formations, including some grenadier regiments raised from officer cadet schools.

Nevertheless, the continuing strength of the Wehrmacht lay in its tactical skills, its command system in the field, and its ability to reorganize quickly at all levels. Time and time again the Germans were able to trounce their opponents by means of their superior performance, despite a vast imbalance of numbers.

German field headquarters were kept small and well forward so as to maintain close contact with subordinate commanders, who in turn used experienced officers as their liaison links with those headquarters. Staff officers were highly trained and able to make quick decisions, for their philosophy was that the unexpected could always happen and one must be able to react decisively. Consequently there was a high degree of personal contact and mutual confidence in the command structure. For instance, it was the normal practice for newly appointed divisional generals and their chiefs of staff to attend a General Staff command course so as to practise working as a team before assuming their roles. The reason for this was that, although the commander took final responsibility, his chief of staff issued orders in his general’s name and was entitled to make command decisions on his own authority when the general was away from headquarters. Also, the system of Auftragstaktik (mission-oriented command) left decisions as to how a given objective was to be achieved to the subordinate commander, thus achieving maximum flexibility of response to any given situation.[17]

However, on 21 January 1945 Hitler issued a Führer-Order severely limiting command initiative down to divisional level, and since then he had persistently interfered with the operations of the formations on his doorstep. Part of this Führer-Order read:

Meanwhile Allied bombing had at last begun to make its mark on the battle front. Railway communications were being seriously disrupted so that supplies were not getting through, and ammunition states were running low. Most serious of all was the lack of motor fuel of all kinds, greatly restricting the number of armoured vehicles available for combat.

Disrupted communications included the troops’ mail, which clearly had an effect on their morale. Those whose homes had not already been overrun had the worry of the continued bombing of the cities and the Western Allies encroaching from the west. They saw themselves as the last bastion against the Bolshevik hordes, and all lived in fear of Soviet captivity, for the ever increasing ruthlessness of the conduct of the war on the Eastern Front by both sides gave them little hope of mercy. Soviet atrocities in East Prussia served as a pertinent reminder of this, which Nazi propaganda did not fail to use to goad the troops on.

From the Baltic Sea to the Czech border, the German defences were organized into two army groups. Army Group Weichsel (Vistula), under Colonel-General Gotthard Heinrici, had the 4th Panzer Army covering the Oder between Stettin in the north and the mouth of the Finow Canal. From there down to Fürstenberg (today’s Eisenhüttenstadt), masking Berlin, came the 9th Army, commanded by General of Infantry Theodor Busse. The final stretch was covered by the 3rd Panzer Army, commanded by General Fritz Herbert Gräser, of Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner’s Army Group Mitte (Centre).

In succession, 9th Army had the following formations deployed from north to south: CI Corps, LVI Panzer Corps, XI SS Panzer Corps, the Frankfurt Fortress Garrison of corps size, and V SS Mountain Corps. Next in line came V Corps of 3rd Panzer Army.