The Second World War (142 page)
On 8 April, as their enemies closed in, Hitler and the Nazi leadership had embarked on a frenzy of killing to pre-empt any chance of another stab-in-the-back. Prominent prisoners, especially those from the July plot and others suspected of treason, were murdered. They included Admiral Canaris, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the cabinet-maker Georg Elser, who had tried to assassinate Hitler in November 1939. ‘Flying courts martial’ handed out death sentences on deserters and any who retreated without orders. Soldiers were told to shoot any officer of whatever rank who told them to pull back. On 19 March Hitler, who had already made clear to close associates that he intended ‘to
take a whole world
’ with him, had issued what was known as the ‘Nero Order’ to destroy bridges, factories and utilities. If the German people were incapable of victory, then in his view they did not deserve to survive. Albert Speer, supported by industrialists and some generals, managed to thwart some of this destruction with the argument that it was defeatist to wreck installations that might be recaptured in a counter-attack.
Hitler began to have doubts about the enigmatic Speer and he began to suspect even his most loyal paladin, Heinrich Himmler, who was trying to ‘sell’ Jews to the Allies or use them as bargaining counters. The Nazi Party’s authority had disintegrated as word spread of Gauleiters escaping to safety with their families, having ordered everyone else to fight to the
death. The braggarts and bullies were revealed for the cowardly hypocrites they really were. The greeting of ‘Heil Hitler!’ and the Nazi salute were now used only by diehard fanatics, or by others made nervous in their presence. Hardly anybody believed any more in Hitler’s ‘
empty phrases and promises
’, as an SS Sicherheitsdienst report warned. People were angry that the regime refused to face the reality of defeat and avoid the senseless waste of more lives. Only the most desperate believed Hitler’s fantasy that a falling-out between the Allies would somehow save Germany.
The Nazi empire was now reduced to a ribbon from Norway down to northern Italy. Only isolated pockets remained outside. Guderian’s demands to repatriate forces, particularly the vast garrison in Norway and the remnants of Army Group North trapped on the Courland Peninsula, had all been angrily rejected by Hitler. His defiance of military logic reduced military commanders to despair. Guderian himself had been sacked on 28 March, after a failed attempt to relieve Küstrin. The row in the Führer bunker had shaken all those who witnessed it. ‘
Hitler became paler
and paler,’ noted the chief of staff’s aide, ‘while Guderian became redder and redder.’
Guderian was replaced by General Hans Krebs, the officer whom Stalin had slapped on the back on the Moscow platform shortly before Operation Barbarossa. Krebs, a short, witty opportunist, had no experience of command, which suited Hitler, since he wanted nothing more than an efficient subordinate to do his bidding. General staff officers at OKH headquarters out at Zossen did not know what to think. They were already suffering from
‘a mixture of nervous energy
and trance’, said one of them, because of the sensation of ‘having to do your duty while seeing at the same time that this duty was completely pointless’.
On 9 April in Italy the 15th Army Group, now under General Mark Clark, launched an offensive beyond the Gothic Line north towards the River Po. The US Fifth Army and the British
Eighth Army
had become even more of an international conglomeration, with the 1st Canadian Division which had taken Rimini in September, the 8th Indian Division, the 2nd New Zealand Division, the 6th South African Armoured Division, II Polish Corps, two Italian formations, a Greek mountain brigade, Brazilian forces and the Jewish Brigade. The US Fifth Army, commanded by Lucien Truscott, finally managed to take Bologna with the help of the Polish Corps, while the Eighth Army took Ferrara and also reached the Po.
Churchill was hoping for a rapid advance. He was concerned that the Soviet–Yugoslav treaty, which was signed two days later, would support Tito’s claims to Trieste and Istria at the head of the Adriatic. Churchill turned down Tito’s requests for more aid. Since the Yugoslavs had entered
the Soviet embrace, they could look instead to Moscow for assistance. He also feared that Soviet power in the region might encourage the Italian Communists, whose partisans already represented a powerful force in northern Italy.
On 11 April the Red Army reached the centre of Vienna. Even before the battle for Berlin, a race for position in post-war Europe was on. Churchill urged Eisenhower to allow Patton’s Third Army to push on to Prague, but the supreme commander insisted on consulting with the Stavka. The refusal was immediate and peremptory. Churchill also became concerned about Denmark. Once across the mouth of the Oder near Stettin, Rokossovsky’s 2nd Belorussian Front could make a dash across Mecklenburg.
On 14 April Hitler issued an
Order of the Day
to his troops on the Oder and Neisse front. Once again it threatened that anyone who did not fulfil his duty would be ‘treated as a traitor to our people’. Hitler, with rambling references to the defeat of the Turks outside Vienna in 1683, claimed that ‘this time the Bolshevik will experience the ancient fate of Asiatics’. (He failed to mention that the city had in fact been saved by Polish heavy cavalry.) Hitler also seemed to ignore the fact that Vienna had just fallen to the Red Army. Goebbels instead coined the slogan ‘Berlin remains German and Vienna will be German again’. Historical parallels and modern propaganda no longer had any effect on the majority of Germans.
Berliners prepared for the onslaught with foreboding. Women were offered pistol-shooting practice. Members of the Volkssturm, some of whom were wearing French helmets captured in 1940, were put to work constructing barricades across streets already littered with masonry and broken glass. Trams and railway goods wagons, filled with stone and rubble, were manoeuvred into place, pavements were ripped up, and individual foxholes dug for men and boys armed with Panzerfaust launchers. Housewives laid in what supplies they could, and they boiled water to be kept in preserving jars for drinking when the taps ran dry.
Teenage members of the Reichsarbeitsdienst, a paramilitary labour service, were inducted en masse into the army. Many of them were forced to witness executions: ‘
To accustom you to death
!’ an officer told them. Mothers and girlfriends came to see them off. These recruits, escorted by NCOs, tried to keep up their spirits with gallows humour as they departed for the Oder front on the S-Bahn local rail network. ‘
See you in the mass grave
!’ was one farewell.
APRIL–MAY 1945
O
n the night of 14 April, German troops dug in on the Seelow Heights west of the River Oder heard tank engines. Music and sinister Soviet propaganda messages blasted at full volume from loudspeakers failed to camouflage the noise as the 1st Guards Tank Army crossed the river into the bridgehead. This extended across the Oderbruch flood plain below them, where a river mist covered the sodden meadows. Altogether nine armies of Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front were poised to attack between the Hohenzollern Canal in the north and Frankfurt an der Oder in the south.
General Chuikov’s 8th Guards Army had increased the bridgehead the day before, with an attack which pushed back the 20th Panzergrenadier Division. Hitler was so angry on hearing the news that he ordered all medals to be stripped from members of the division until they won them back. Chuikov was displeased for a very different reason. He heard that on the night of 15 April Marshal Zhukov would take over his command post on the Reitwein Spur because it had the best view of the Oder flood plain and the Seelow Heights. Relations between the two commanders had deteriorated further since Chuikov’s strong criticisms over the failure to push on immediately to Berlin at the beginning of February.
More than eighty kilometres to the south of Zhukov’s left flank, Marshal Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front lined the Neisse with seven armies. Its political department worked up a powerful message of revenge: ‘
There will be no pity
. They have sown the wind and now they are reaping the whirlwind.’
News of the change in the party line in Moscow the day before had not reached the front lines. Stalin had finally understood that both the rhetoric and the reality of vengeance were simply intensifying German resistance. This was also why the bulk of the German army was so keen to surrender to the Allied armies in the west. In his view, this greatly increased the risk that the Americans would take Berlin before the Red Army.
On 14 April Georgii Aleksandrov, the head of Soviet propaganda, published an important article in
Pravda
, which was almost certainly dictated by Stalin himself. This attacked Ilya Ehrenburg’s calls for revenge and his description of Germany as ‘only a colossal gang’. Aleksandrov’s piece,
entitled ‘
Comrade Ehrenburg Oversimplifies
’, said that while some German officers ‘fight for the cannibal regime, others throw bombs at Hitler and his clique [the July plotters], or persuade Germans to put down their weapons [General von Seydlitz and the League of German Officers]. The Gestapo hunt for opponents of the regime, and the appeals to Germans to denounce them proved that not all Germans were the same.’ He also quoted Stalin’s remark: ‘Hitlers come and go, but Germany and the Germans remain.’ Ehrenburg was devastated to find himself being sacrificed in this way, yet most officers and soldiers took little notice of the change in policy. The propaganda image of Germans as ravening beasts had gone too deep.
The Soviet authorities, even within sight of victory, did not trust their own troops. Officers were told to name any of their ‘
morally and politically unstable
’ men who might desert to warn the enemy of the attack, so that SMERSh could arrest them. And General Serov, the NKVD chief who had supervised the repression of eastern Poland in 1939, became alarmed about the ‘
unhealthy moods developed
among the officers and soldiers of the 1st Polish Army’. They had become excited about the rapid advance of the British and American armies in the west, having listened illegally to the BBC. They convinced themselves that General Anders’s forces were approaching Berlin. ‘As soon as our troops meet up with Anders’s men,’ an artillery commanding officer was accused of saying by a SMERSh informer, ‘then you can say goodbye to the [Soviet-controlled] provisional government. The London government will take power again and Poland will once more be what it was before 1939. England and America will help Poland get rid of the Russians.’ Serov’s operatives arrested nearly 2,000 men just before the offensive.
German officers were even more concerned about disaffection in their ranks. They were horrified when young soldiers shouted back at Soviet loudspeaker broadcasts that were telling them to give up, to ask whether they would be sent to Siberia if they laid down their arms. Officers in the Fourth Panzer Army facing Konev’s troops on the Neisse confiscated white handkerchiefs to prevent them being used as a sign of surrender. Men caught hiding or attempting to desert were forced out into no-man’s-land and ordered to dig trenches there. Many commanders resorted to desperate lies. They claimed that thousands of tanks were arriving to support them, that new miracle weapons would be used against the enemy, and even that the western Allies were joining them to fight the Bolsheviks. Junior officers were told to have no compunction about shooting any of their men who wavered, and that if all their men ran away, then they had better shoot themselves.
A Luftwaffe Oberleutnant commanding a scratch company of trainee
technicians was standing in his trench next to his senior NCO. He shivered. ‘
Tell me
,’ he said turning to the Kompanietruppführer. ‘Are you also cold?’ ‘We’re not cold, Herr Oberleutnant,’ he replied. ‘We’re afraid.’
On the eve of battle Red Army soldiers shaved and wrote letters. Sappers were already at work in the dark removing mines ahead of their advance. Chuikov had to control his temper when he saw a convoy of staff cars bringing Marshal Zhukov and his entourage, as they approached his command post on the Reitwein Spur with their headlights on.
At 05.00 hours Moscow time on 16 April, which was two hours earlier by Berlin time, Zhukov’s ‘god of war’ opened fire, with 8,983 guns, heavy mortars and Katyusha batteries. It was the most intense barrage of the whole war, with 1,236,000 rounds fired on the first day alone. The intensity was so great that even sixty kilometres away on the eastern side of Berlin walls vibrated. Sensing that the great offensive had begun, housewives emerged from their front doors and began to talk to neighbours in subdued tones, with anxious glances towards the east. Women and girls wondered whether the Americans would reach Berlin first to save them from the Red Army.
Zhukov was pleased with his idea of using 143 searchlights to dazzle the enemy. But both the bombardment and the searchlights proved unhelpful to his men. As the infantry charged forward, shouting ‘Na Berlin!’, the searchlights behind silhouetted them, and the ground ahead was so churned up by craters that their progress was slow. Surprisingly, the artillery had concentrated on the first line of defence, despite the Red Army’s awareness of the German tactic of withdrawing all but a small covering force when a major attack was expected.
Zhukov, who usually reconnoitred the ground carefully before an attack, had failed to do so this time. He had relied instead on air-reconnaissance photographs, but these images did not reveal what a strong defensive feature the Seelow Heights represented. At first, Chuikov’s 8th Guards Army on the left and Colonel General Nikolai Berzarin’s 5th Shock Army on the right advanced quite well. The 1st Guards Tank Army would then pass through them once they had secured the crest. At dawn, Shturmovik ground-attack aircraft streaked in, flying through the fountains of earth thrown up by the shelling, to strafe and bomb German defences and vehicles. Their greatest success was to hit the German Ninth Army’s ammunition depot, which blew up in a massive explosion.