Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (15 page)

Josef Harpe’s open-topped staff car raced along the road from Kielce to Krakow. The
Generaloberst
pulled up his fur collar to protect his face from the icy wind blowing across the plains of southern Poland. Filled with unease, the general had paid another visit to Fourth Panzer Army’s lines around the Baranow bridgehead. It was the small hours of 10 January by the time Harpe’s car finally pulled up in front of the school where the general and his staff were accommodated. As Harpe entered the building,
Generalleutnant
von Xylander approached him. The tall, thin chief of staff looked at his general with a serious expression. “The Führer refused everything,” he told Harpe. “The front stays where it is. And the situation stays as it is. The Führer does not believe there will be a Russian attack.”
⁶⁴

In a large hospital tent in a forest outside Staszów towards the southern edge of the bridgehead, there was lively talk among the officers of Third Guards Tank Army: regimental, brigade, divisional, and corps commanders. The sides of the tent were covered with maps and sketches, marked with red and blue lines and arrows. In the centre, there was a huge sandpit with the terrain of the Vistula landscape carefully duplicated. An officer shouted: “Attention!”, and Marshal Ivan Konev, accompanied by several generals, entered the tent. Third Guards Tank Army’s chief of staff Bachmetjev took the floor, outlining the plan of attack, moving his pointing stick over the sandpit. Konev studied the sandpit closely, then turned to the officers standing around the tent. “Our 1st Ukrainian Front possesses a mighty punch and firepower,” the shaven-headed marshal told the assembled commanders. “We’re almost on the border of Fascist Germany. Just one more leap is needed for final victory. We have the great honour of being among the first to cross the frontier.” The watchword of the coming offensive was speed, Blitzkrieg Soviet-style. “Don’t get drawn into small fire-fights,” he impressed upon the men of Third Guards Tank Army, “the steel arrow” of his front. “Detour around resistance. Don’t hang around in towns. Thrust into the heartland. Don’t worry about your flanks. Penetrate deep into the heart of Germany.” But Ivan Konev added a word of caution. “Nothing does more harm than underestimating the enemy’s strength,” he warned. “A bitter struggle awaits us.” He pointed to the lines of German fortifications which surrounded the bridgehead. “The German soldier is still strong and doesn’t retreat without orders, and the units committed against us are commanded by experienced generals.” And on native soil, the German soldier would fight with even greater fanaticism. But then Ivan Konev smiled. “What Soviet soldier doesn’t dream of storming the lair of the Fascist beast?”
⁶⁵

That had become the Red Army’s battle cry by 1945. No longer “Liberate the Soviet Motherland from the Fascist German occupiers.” Now it was “Deal with the Fascist beast in his lair!”, “Raise the banner of victory over the Fascist lair!” or “Forward, we are liberating our brothers and sisters from Fascist slavery!” The letters of the
frontoviki
are filled with contempt and hatred for their foe –
Nemtsy
(Germans),
fashisty
(Fascists),
gitlerovtsy
(Hitlerites) and, especially, Fritzes. German soldiers were, one Russian major observed, “the only fighters in Europe who deserved our respect,”
⁶⁶
but that didn’t stop the men branding their enemy ‘beasts’ or ‘barbarians’ – the same invectives used by the German propaganda machine to describe Soviet soldiers. They felt imbued with a holy mission to wreak vengeance “for the misery they inflicted on Leningrad and Byelorussia”. No distinction was made between ‘Nazi’ and ‘German’, between SS and Wehrmacht. “The entire German Armed Forces – from commanders to soldiers – took part in plunder,” senior Party leader Mikhail Kalinin declared. “Every German, from Hitler to the common man, was an accomplice in the tortures and murders.”
⁶⁷
In every division, even battalion, every company,
politruks
– political agitators – sought to “educate personnel along the lines of love of the Motherland, loyalty to their oath and burning hatred of the enemy”, especially when an offensive was imminent.
⁶⁸
During the autumn of 1944, more than forty visits by officers and political leaders in one of Konev’s tank armies were arranged to the death camp at Majdanek near Lublin, liberated that summer. They returned to their troops and encouraged “the soldiers to hate the enemy using material from the Lublin camp”, while newspaper articles urged:
Pomni Majdanek, voin Krasnoj Armii
! – Remember Majdanek, Red Army warriors!
⁶⁹
By far the most virulent – and popular– anti-German propaganda came from the pen of journalist Ilya Ehrenburg. His exhortation “If you kill one German, kill another – there is nothing more amusing for us than a heap of German corpses” had been widely disseminated among the troops in 1942. Two more years of war did nothing to mollify the propagandist. “It is not only divisions and armies marching on Berlin,” Ehrenburg wrote after Majdanek had been liberated. “The grief of all the innocents from mass graves, ditches and gorges are marching on Berlin. The cabbage patches of Majdanek and the trees of Vitebsk where the Germans hanged their unfortunate victims, the boots and shoes of those men and women and children shot and gassed at Majdanek: they are all marching on Berlin.” To Ehrenburg, it was imperative there should never be another Majdanek: “We do not want our children to have to fight again. Finish it properly! Finish it in such a way that they will not start again! Make them forget how to fight. Pull out the sting, break off their claws,” he urged. “It is time to finish off the Germans.”
⁷⁰

There were selfish motives for fighting, not least a plethora of medals: for the defence of Leningrad, Moscow, the Caucasus, Stalingrad, and the highest distinction of all, Hero of the Soviet Union; more than 11,000 were awarded. Of far greater use to the ordinary Ivan, however, was money. The destruction of a panzer earned an anti-tank gun crew 2,000 roubles – three times the monthly wage of a private, two weeks’ pay for a sergeant. But the simplest – and strongest – incentive was to end the war as quickly as possible and return home. “The quicker we get to Berlin, the quicker we get home, the quicker we see our beloved families and friends again,” a company commander wrote to his wife in Minsk. “What I would not give to experience that day!”
⁷¹
By 1945, the
frontovik
was “tired of fighting and looked anxiously towards the war’s end,” one officer recalled,
⁷²
while a former metal worker, now a senior sergeant in a signals company, wrote home to Kiev:

Your love has protected me from enemy bullets and shells up to now. We will only feel joy and happiness when we are united once more. For four years, we have overcome one difficulty after the next in the hope that we would be happy once more, that Fate would unite us once more, that we are never separated again until the end of our lives. But all these are hopes, all this still lies before us.
⁷³

There were still a few Soviet soldiers willing to desert, to risk crawling over the minefields to stumble into German lines. A Ukrainian deserter ignored the political commissar who threatened him and his fifty-nine compatriots and crossed Infantry Regiment 514’s front near Łukawa. He reached the second line of trenches – given grandiose names such as
Panther
,
Tiger I
,
Tiger II
,
Neger
(Negro)
I
– before he ran into a German soldier, so weakly occupied were they.

It was the last flurry of excitement for the men of the 514th. Otherwise life went on as normal. At first and last light the men gathered corn for the company’s horses. Before, afterwards and in between, the
Landsers
were on guard, on watch, perhaps for fifteen or sixteen hours a day. “We’re simply waiting for the great offensive which must come any day,” Hans Jürgen Hartmann observed. The Russians were “pumping their bridgehead full to bursting, always more, always fuller, week after week” until one day, Hartmann predicted, it would “burst with a roar.”
⁷⁴

Notes

1.
Hartmann,
Zwischen Nichts und Niemandsland
, pp.591-4.

2.
Wrocławska epopeja
, pp.143, 145, and Gleiss, i, p.123C.

3.
Arnhold, pp.7-14.

4.
Hartmann,
Zwischen Nichts und Niemandsland
, pp.581-2.

5.
Kunz, p.200.

6.
Ibid., p.167.

7.
Kunz, pp.151-4 and Magenheimer, pp.45-9.

8.
Kunz, p.232.

9.
Glantz and House,
When Titans Clashed
, pp.292 and 306.

10.
Alexijewitsch, p.322.

11.
Gelfand, p.77.

12.
Alexijewitsch, p.228.

13.
Ibid., p.77.

14.
Ibid., p.208.

15.
Ibid., pp.257-8.

16.
Ibid., p.77.

17.
Ibid., p.257.

18.
Art of War Symposium, p.70.

19.
Litvin, p.13.

20.
Gelfand, pp.57-8.

21.
Zeidler, p.132.

22.
Magenheimer, pp.92-3.

23.
BA-MA RH2/2468.

24.
Hartmann,
Zwischen Nichts und Niemandsland
, p.552.

25.
Ibid., pp.547, 554, 567, 569, 581.

26.
Adamcyzk, p.348.

27.
BA-MA RH13/48.

28.
Kunz, p.116.

29.
Messerschmidt, pp.324, 344, 374, 377.

30.
NA WO204/985.

31.
NA WO204/987.

32.
Messerschmidt, pp.430-1, 466.

33.
Kunz, pp.243, 246, 247-8.

34.
Messerschmidt, p.466.

35.
Zoepf, p.117.

36.
Cited in
Das Russlandbild in Dritten Reich
, p.161.

37.
Müller, Sven Oliver,
Deutsche Soldaten und ihre Feinde
, p.189.

38.
Messerschmidt,
Was damals Recht war
, p.63.

39.
Seidler,
Die Militärgerichtsbarkeit der Deutschen Wehrmacht
, p.188.

40.
Messerschmidt, p.375.

41.
Seidler,
Die Militärgerichtsbarkeit der Deutschen Wehrmacht
, p.173.

42.
Frodien, p.120.

43.
Wette,
Der Krieg des Kleinen Mannes
, pp.282-3.

44.
Seidler,
Die Militärgerichtsbarkeit der Deutschen Wehrmacht
, p.227.

45.
Shulman, p.278.

46.
Messerschmidt, p.368.

47.
See BA-MA RH13/48 and RH13/49.

48.
Adamczyk, pp.346-8.

49.
Schleicher, Karl-Theodor and Walle, Heinrich (eds),
Aus Feldpostbriefen junger Christen 1939-1945
, p.326.

50.
BA-MA RH13/49.

51.
Asmus, ix, pp.39-40.

52.
Hartmann,
Zwischen Nichts und Niemandsland
, pp.581-2.