Armageddon (92 page)

Ivanov’s tank column, still two miles from Danzig city centre, resumed its advance at first light. As they left open country behind and began to move among buildings, they met group after group of Hitler Youth armed with fausts and Molotov cocktails, who wreaked havoc. The regiment lost at least fifteen tanks to hand-held weapons in the street fighting that followed. Ivanov’s own Stalin was hit in Hochenstrasse, in the first daylight hours of 30 March. He found himself soaked in blazing fuel, against which his fire-resistant suit provided scant protection. He was fully conscious and watched his cherished German boots burning before his eyes. He collapsed into the turret, screaming in pain. His crew dragged him out through the lower hatch, still under fire, and threw him into a big pool of melted snow by the roadside. Ivanov wrote gaily to his parents, in the tones of reassurance used by many soldier sons: “I am completely safe and well, and enjoying wonderful weather in Germany!” In reality, he spent twenty-two days in a field hospital. His regiment lost forty out of its fifty-five tanks in Danzig. All its company commanders were killed.

There was a black-comic song Russian tank crews sang, of which one line ran: “Our legs are torn off and our faces are on fire!” Ivanov’s friend and fellow troop commander Vladimir Dobroradov, who led their column into Danzig, had a leg amputated after the battle. He was a dazzlingly handsome young man, an ardent dancer. When Dobroradov awoke from anaesthesia, he gave way to despair and shot himself with a small pistol. Ivanov believed that Dobroradov met his fate because over the preceding weeks he had diverted himself in off-duty hours by flirting with the “field wife” of his brigade commander. That officer, who was unamused, ordered his impertinent young rival to take point position in the Danzig attack. Ivanov always afterwards thought of the biblical tale of Uriah the Hittite. Their regimental commander, who had incurred Panov’s wrath, also died in those days. A German woman walked up and shot the colonel at point-blank range, in an act of vengeance for her own rape by Soviet soldiers. “Such things were happening,” shrugged Ivanov. “In Rokossovsky’s mob, Rokossovsky permitted it.” The woman survived only long enough to explain her motive, before being bayoneted.

IN THE STREETS
of Danzig during the last days of its defence, the SS and field police hanged scores of men who had abandoned their units. Russian aircraft harried to destruction retreating columns of German troops and vehicles. On 25 March, a certain Colonel Christern passed through Danzig to assume command of 4th Panzer Division. Given the urgency of his appointment, his signals officer was astonished when the panzer leader halted beside one of the city’s few surviving churches.

The colonel looked about inquisitively, and then a delicate smile lit his battle-scarred face. He shot a silent glance at me to indicate that I was to seat myself on a bench, thereupon he and the driver climbed a steep flight of steps to the loft . . . I was somewhat uncomfortable sitting there while the rumble of combat carried from outside. Then I nearly jumped out of my skin . . . the organ roared into life . . . I knew that the colonel was devoted to music . . . but this was the first time I had heard him on the organ—and he played it like a master.

Von Saucken ordered the final evacuation of the ruined city, which had become indefensible, on the night of 27 March. The surviving German troops in the area were now isolated on the Hela peninsula, where some remained until the end of the war, and on the coastal plateau of the Oxhofter Kampe, from which von Saucken was able to evacuate several units by sea in the week following the fall of Danzig. Until the very end of the war, soldiers and refugees continued to be rescued by sea from the marshy meadows of the Vistula delta.

Fourteen-year-old Erich Pusch, a fugitive who had lost his parents on the ice of the Frisches Haff, lay in a cellar in Danzig with his young brother and a dozen or so other terrified people, mostly women and children. The first Russian entered their refuge early on the morning of 31 March. The man demanded to know if there were any German soldiers present. Assured that there were not, he collected all watches and rings, then left. Young Erich put his head cautiously into the street to investigate, and saw some very young Russian soldiers standing around their tanks. Occasional shells were still exploding, fired by German naval guns. Erich returned to the cellar. They all sat in dread, awaiting the worst. The next Russians to arrive were very drunk. They took all the women into the adjoining room and raped them, amid hysterical pleas for mercy. Returning, the Russians noticed lying on the floor a young Russian PoW, who had lost a leg before his capture. One Red soldier bayoneted him and then, when the doomed man screamed, shot him. Every soldier in the Soviet armies had been thoroughly briefed that fellow countrymen who had surrendered to the fascists were traitors. The soldiers then demanded the shoes of everyone present, collected these in a bag, and departed. The women were left sobbing. Late that night, Mongolians came, and raped a fifteen-year-old girl. After that, successive waves of Russians reappeared all night, bent on the same business. They ignored the old men and children, but raped the women repeatedly.

Next morning, the Pusch boys and their companions emerged traumatized from the cellar, to find the city in flames. People were streaming from their houses clutching such possessions as they could carry. Erich saw German soldiers hanging from the tram pylons, executed as deserters. The great column of refugees shuffled through the streets, watched by throngs of Red soldiers. Russians began to pull men from the line and examine them. Some, presumably suspected of being soldiers in civilian clothes, were shot. Then the Russians began to pick out girls. One or two clutching babies handed these to older women to take away, then went sobbing after the Russians to meet their fate. Twenty-five-year-old Frieda Engler, a cousin of Elfi Kowitz, was raped eighteen times by Russian soldiers outside Danzig.

On and on the Pusch boys walked westwards, beyond the city and its suburbs. They were exhausted and desperately hungry. They slept that night in a ditch. Next day, a woman saw them walking in their stockinged feet and took pity. She led them to her house, where her two teenage daughters were hidden behind the bedroom wardrobe. There they lived as scavengers through the two desperate, ravening months that followed.

The same fate befell eleven-year-old Anita Bartsch. The Russians swept into the air-raid shelter where she was hiding with her family, demanding watches and women, “
Uri!
Uri!
Frau!
Frau!
,” in their usual fashion. After being relieved of their watches, the fugitives unwillingly ascended to the street, to perceive a pile of corpses. Anita’s eldest sister Maria was raped, then sent to a Russian detention camp with their mother and teenage brother. Anita found herself living alone with her four-year-old brother and three-year-old nephew in a derelict flat. Through the weeks that followed, she scavenged and stole just sufficient fragments of food to keep them alive: “We lived like little animals.” The ruined city was a ghastly place for survivors of any age. Once, she came upon a shallow river bed, filled with the bloated and decayed corpses of German soldiers. After six weeks, the Russians released the rest of the family. By a miracle, Anita’s sister Maria found them: “She was in a bad way, and all of us were suffering from severe malnutrition. My mother scarcely had any flesh left on her bones.” Soon afterwards, the Russians began evicting all Germans from Danzig to make way for the new Polish occupants. The traumatized survivors of the Bartsch family rode a railway flatcar to Berlin, and thereafter to a displaced-persons camp where they spent the next three years. “My mother never got over it and died five years later—she was just fifty,” said Anita Bartsch. “My father was very sick when at last we were reunited. He never worked again.” Photographs of the family at that time show faces imprinted with imperishable pain.

In the streets of Danzig, Captain Vasily Krylov watched the manic looting of abandoned shops. “The whole place stank of corpses.” He saw soldiers cheering the discovery of a tanker wagon of alcohol. They emptied their weapons into it until spirits spouted from a hundred holes, then stood open-mouthed beneath the fountains of liquor. Many men, said Krylov, were angered by the splendour in which they perceived the Germans to have been living, the riches of their houses. “They were bitter about what the Germans had done to us, when they saw how Hitler’s people lived at home.” “It was very difficult to maintain order as we advanced into Germany,” admitted Major Fyodor Romanovsky of the NKVD. There was considerable confusion in the upper ranks of the Red Army about the limits of tolerable behaviour. Yelena Kogan’s commanding officer took a call one day in Poznan from a Polish unit complaining that two Russians had raped a local woman. “Shoot them!” ordered the Soviet officer. Kogan observed drily: “His attitude proved to be behind the times. Our colonel did not know what the rest of the army was doing in Germany.”

The old Pomeranian coastal fortress of Kolberg was cut off by the Russians on 4 March. Its garrison consisted of only 3,300 men, mostly stragglers and Volkssturm, commanded by an elderly veteran of German South-West Africa, Colonel Fritz Fullriede. They could call on the support of four broken-down tanks, which had to be towed into action by trucks, and naval gunfire from two destroyers offshore. Fullriede was also obliged to assume responsibility for 68,000 civilians. Russian attacks began on 13 March. Fullriede dismissed calls for Kolberg’s surrender. Warships continued the evacuation throughout the siege, taking off refugees to Swinemünde. It was painfully slow work. Some families killed themselves, despairing of escape. Yet Fullriede’s garrison, at the cost of almost half its strength, held the line until the evacuation of civilians was complete on 16 March. The colonel then achieved a last small miracle, supervising the evacuation of his soldiers from their coastal perimeter only a mile wide and 400 yards deep, early on the morning of 18 March. Fullriede was awarded the Knight’s Cross for what was, indeed, the fulfilment of a heroic humanitarian purpose.

For most of March, 105,000 men of Third Panzer Army retained one major German foothold east of the Oder, a sixty-mile strip of front known as the Altdamm bridgehead, commanded by Hasso von Manteuffel. The Russians attacked here on 14 March. Next day Hitler began systematically stripping Third Panzer Army of troops to reinforce Berlin. Von Manteuffel decided that his position was untenable. He withdrew all his surviving forces across the Oder next night, demolishing the river bridges. On 21 March, the Russians mopped up the survivors in Altdamm town, capturing large quantities of abandoned equipment and armour.

Germany’s generals were stunned by Hitler’s appointment of Heinrich Himmler, whose skills lay solely in the field of mass murder, to military command of the Vistula front late in January. Guderian described Himmler’s role as “preposterous . . . I used such argumentative powers as I possessed in an attempt to stop such an idiocy being perpetrated on the unfortunate Eastern front . . . all in vain.” Once arrived at his headquarters, the Reichsführer SS proved wholly unable to exercise command functions, even with the assistance as his chief of staff of another accomplished killer, SS General Heinz Lammerding, whose men had carried out the Oradour massacre in France. Himmler’s tenure as Vistula commander proved as disastrous as the Wehrmacht had anticipated. On 18 March, Guderian discovered that the SS chief had abandoned his headquarters and was said to be nursing a bad cold in a sanatorium at Hohenlychen. In truth, he had suffered a nervous collapse. Guderian had little trouble persuading Himmler that he should ask to be relieved of responsibility for command of the front, and there was no resistance from Hitler.

On 22 March, General Gotthard Heinrici, commander of First Panzer Army in the Carpathians, a dogged little old soldier, went to see Guderian at his headquarters in the complex of low, camouflage-painted concrete buildings at Zossen, nerve centre of the German Army’s war effort. Guderian told him that a big counter-attack was being planned from the Frankfurt-on-Oder bridgehead, against the Russians threatening Küstrin. This fortress, once the prison of Frederick the Great, stood on an island in the Oder some fifty miles east of Berlin. The Russians had briefly penetrated its defences early in February, before being evicted.

Now, Hitler insisted that an attempt to relieve Küstrin should start in two days. The hapless Heinrici must assume responsibility. Yet before the attack could be launched, the Russians themselves attacked, on that same morning of 22 March. When the German counter-attack was launched on the 23rd, it was halted in its tracks by Soviet artillery fire. Heinrici urged Hitler to abandon Küstrin, which was isolated. As usual, the Führer demurred. He insisted on further counter-attacks. On 27 March, three divisions of Ninth Army launched an assault which so surprised the Russians that the leading German tanks reached the outskirts of Küstrin. But there they were stopped, and ruthlessly destroyed. “It was a massacre,” said Heinrici grimly. Eight thousand men had died for nothing. Next day, Hitler dismissed Guderian, asserting that his health required an immediate six weeks’ convalescent leave. The last of Germany’s great field commanders was replaced as Chief of Staff by General Hans Krebs on 29 March. The same day, the Russians launched an intense bombardment of Küstrin. The garrison broke out and escaped on its own initiative that night, though a few survivors lingered to die fighting as the Russians occupied the fortress. On reaching the German lines, Küstrin’s commander was immediately imprisoned by Hitler.

Breslau, capital of lower Silesia, held out through an epic siege of seventy-seven days, which only ended a week after Hitler’s death. The city was encircled on 16 February. It took the Russians a fortnight to fight their way through a bare mile of southern suburbs, against determined resistance. The garrison, some 50,000 strong, still looked for relief from Schörner’s Army Group Centre. After the flight west of many Silesian refugees, plunging into snows and perils that brought death to thousands, some 80,000 civilians remained in Breslau. Behind the front lines, scores of houses had been destroyed by the defenders to open a fire zone. Firemen, industrial workers, service personnel threw themselves into the defence with a courage worthy of a better cause. Factories continued to produce ammunition, cigarettes—600,000 of them a day—heavy mortar bombs. The garrison even constructed an armoured train. Luftwaffe night sorties maintained deliveries of mail and some stores.