Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (14 page)

While the entire German nation is involved in the most bitter defensive struggle, your son neglected his duty as a German and as a soldier in the basest way and defied laws which preserve the fighting strength and life of the German nation. In view of the severity of his crime and the demands of the fifth year of war, only the most severe punishment could be imposed.

I can assure you that your son died like a man. His final words were for his parents.

I must point out that obituary notices and obituaries are not permitted in newspapers, journals and the like.
⁴⁴

By late 1944, there was a final method of Nazi tyranny to keep the German soldier in his place: the
Sippenhaft
. Not only were the deserters themselves sentenced to death, but their families faced arrest and would be deprived of any pension or pay. “Every deserter will find his just punishment,” Heinrich Himmler warned. “His ignominious behaviour will entail the most severe consequences for his family.”
⁴⁵
It was soon extended to cases of men taken prisoner “without being wounded or fighting to the bitter end”.
⁴⁶
The threat of death and the
Sippenhaft
or not, 6,000
Landsers
were deserting from the front every month.

Outnumbered, outgunned, facing draconian punishment, with the danger of his family being arrested, with little news from home, the German soldier doggedly held the line in the East. There were still many
Landsers
who believed the words of their leaders, who believed in the ‘wonder weapons’, who believed in Germany’s star. “As long as we have our Führer, there is no reason to doubt victory,” one
Leutnant
assured his wife in Breslau. “There will soon be a turning point in the fortunes of war, soon we will strike once more.” An ‘old
Ostkämpfer
’ (eastern warrior) from Striegau, thirty miles west of Breslau, told his wife not to worry. “Even if the roar of battle has come a little closer to our border, there’s no reason to drop your head,” he wrote home. “Fight even more fanatically, be even more ready for action, work and above all be confident.” The wife of a soldier from Görlitz in south-west Silesia admired her husband’s confidence. “I really couldn’t think any other way,” he wrote back. “Every day I see new units, replacements for us, and all manner of weapons arriving. We have brought the Russians to a halt here. Their attacks are beaten off under very heavy losses on his side, his armour losses are considerable.” Victory, he predicted, “will be ours. The very good fighting spirit of the men and now the homeland which is prepared to make every effort are our guarantors of victory.”
⁴⁷
Others, like gunner Werner Adamczyk holding the perimeter of the Baranow bridgehead, believed it would be “just a matter of time” before the Wehrmacht was rolling west again. “We simply were outnumbered in everything – in men, artillery and tanks,” he recalled. “I never saw a smile on any face any more. Joking around had stopped. We just lived in mental misery until our survival responses were triggered by Ivan’s next major attack.”
⁴⁸
Dominating all thoughts, wrote one
Gefreiter
defending the front on the Vistula, was “that great longing for peace”. But what sort of peace, he wondered. “When it finally comes, how much misfortune, murder, misery and destruction will it have inflict on our homeland,
ja
, over all mankind.”
⁴⁹
An
Unteroffizier
in the Fourth Panzer Army readily admitted that his comrades talked openly of peace. “No one believes in victory any longer,” he wrote. “Everyone hopes that it will soon come to an end. It doesn’t matter on what terms, just get the war over with. This is not some wish, the hopes of one person, that’s how we all talk, think, wish.”
⁵⁰
Oberleutnant
Walter Blöhs, an adjutant in Panzer Grenadier Regiment 90 weighed up his men’s combat experience against Russian numbers. “What use is it against an enemy who’s four, five times as strong?” he asked himself. “Courage and experience are no use.” The Russians enjoyed such superiority, possessed so many men, so much material, “while we have to save every litre of fuel, every shell”, Blöhs fumed. “We only have the skin on our backs to defend ourselves.” Conversation in the bunkers and dugouts revolved around a single question: what happens now? “The many defeats we suffered last year, the heavy losses in men and material, the vast area which we have given up – all this has a negative impact on the morale of the men when it comes to approaching the battle with a great deal of confidence,” Walter Blöhs observed. Yet he also noticed something else. Privately, they may have felt it, but among comrades not a single man said: “If only this was finally over!”
⁵¹
Hans Jürgen Hartmann continued to lead his men into the trenches to dig and to practise attacks. It would have been better, he mused, to teach his men how to retreat, or how to receive a wound which would take them home to the Reich for treatment. “This year we’ve not been successful anywhere – on no front, on no sea, and certainly not in the skies of the homeland,” he lamented. “Yet despite it all, we still believe in final victory, we want to cling to this hope with every sinew.”
⁵²
And so the
Oberleutnant
fought on. His comrades fought on. They fought not for a great idea, not for Western Civilisation, but for each other, and above all for their families. “If we imagine what will happen if we’re defeated,” a doctor in a panzer division recorded in his diary. “Our wives surrendered to the despotism of these Asians, our children abducted, and we ourselves will be in forced labour somewhere! Better to be dead than a slave!”
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The men, one Silesian officer recalled a quarter of a century later, “thought only about our women and children and what would happen to all of them if the enemy continued advancing. That was what still held us together.” Did the men want to die for Adolf Hitler? an interviewer asked. “
Nein
,” the officer said forcefully. “Who was Hitler anyway?”
⁵⁴

Adolf Hitler expected the men at Baranow and Puławy to die, of course. He expected them to die – but not just yet. All through October, November and December 1944 the evidence of the Soviet build-up on the Vistula was placed before him. He ignored it and frittered away what reserves in men and, above all, material the Reich still possessed in the Ardennes. He ignored it again on Christmas Eve when it was clear that the offensive in the West had failed. “Who’s responsible for producing all this rubbish?” he flashed at Heinz Guderian, as the Chief of the General Staff presented the latest ominous intelligence assessment of Red Army forces massing in Poland. “It’s the greatest bluff since Ghengis Khan.”
⁵⁵
The real bluff came from Hitler and his acolytes with their talk of wonder weapons, of new tanks, of jet aircraft turning the tide of war. The Führer was dreaming of the summer. Fifty new divisions, manned by soldiers born in 1928 – sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds – would “decide the war”. German industry would work at full tilt to equip these new formations. “The war will reach its climax in the summer of 1945,” he predicted, “and the summer will also bring its decision.”
⁵⁶
His generals in the East spread the word. “Never had so many tanks and aircraft been built, in none of the years of war had so much ammunition been produced, so many new guns sent to the front, as in this fifth year of war,” Fourth Panzer Army’s commander General Fritz-Hubert Gräser assured Hans Jürgen Hartmann and his comrades on a visit to the front. The Russians “could pump what they liked into the Baranow bridgehead”. They would find anti-tank guns, panzers and reserve divisions waiting for them “like never before”. The men of Infantry Regiment 514 were filled with fresh hope. “It was truly intoxicating listening to him,” Hartmann wrote. “The production figures alone were so incredible that now the turning point had actually been reached.”
⁵⁷

The figures
were
incredible. Or rather they were fantasy. For each mile of Gräser’s 116-mile front there were in reality just 176 men, five artillery barrels, just two combat-worthy panzers, a couple of working
Sturmgeschütze
, and three anti-tank guns. The predicament of Gräser’s superior,
Generaloberst
Josef Harpe, was equally dire. The previous July, Army Group A’s front had stretched for 378 miles, held by 123,000 front-line infantrymen. By the beginning of 1945, the front was fifty miles longer but defended by 30,000 fewer
Landsers
.
⁵⁸
Harpe’s talented chief-of-staff,
Generalleutnant
Wolfdietrich von Xylander, had devised an imaginative solution. Xylander proposed evacuating German lines a couple of days before the Russian attack, falling back to a line of fortifications several miles to the west. It would spare the troops the brunt of the Soviet barrage and shorten their lines by a good sixty miles. Maybe there, perhaps on a second prepared line which followed the River Nida, twenty miles west of the Baranow bridgehead, but certainly along the border of Silesia, Xylander reasoned, the Russian offensive would be brought to a standstill. Above all this grand plan, named
Schlittenfahrt
– sleigh ride – would “keep the enemy away from German soil”.
⁵⁹
During a four-day tour of the Eastern Front, Harpe convinced Heinz Guderian of the wisdom of ‘sleigh ride’. He promised to put it to Hitler at their next encounter.

At his headquarters in the Sandomierz bridgehead, a telephone call was put through to Ivan Konev. Eclipsed by Georgi Zhukov as the Soviet Union’s most famous general, the shaven-headed marshal was at least his equal on the battlefield and surpassed him for ruthlessness. Like Zhukov, the forty-seven-year-old general had served in the Tsar’s army. Unlike Zhukov, however, he had served as a political commissar in the Red Army in the 1920s. But Ivan Konev was no Party crony who had earned his position through political connections. He had trained at the famous Frunze Military Academy, served in the Far East during the skirmishes with the Japanese in the late 1930s, and been recalled to the western USSR in the spring of 1941 when war threatened the Motherland. The men knew him as ‘the general who never retreated’ – an inaccurate sobriquet, for Konev had not merely been defeated, he had very nearly been executed after his armies were crushed at Vyazma in October 1941 in one of the greatest battles of encirclement in history. He survived, and led new armies with aplomb that winter as the German advance was first halted then turned back before Moscow. It was in the Ukraine, commanding the front – the Russian equivalent to an army group – which bore the region’s name, that he made his mark, in bitter, bloody fighting. Victory at Korsun earned Konev the marshal’s baton, but he was rarely interested in the trappings of rank, covering his uniform with a cloak when he visited the front line so the men did not feel shy or embarrassed in his presence. Wherever he went, so did his library: Livy, Pushkin, Tolstoy. It was the only luxury Ivan Konev afforded himself. His quarters were usually a small cottage or hut. He rarely drank – and castigated members of his staff who did, one sign of his fearsome temper. Above all, Konev was exacting, of his staff, of his men, of himself. He never underestimated his enemy, demanding his men study their foe, know their positions, their methods, their minds. He was a master of deceit, using all manner of tricks to fool the enemy about his intentions. And when the attack came, Ivan Konev accompanied it with a tremendous artillery barrage to crush the enemy’s means of communications, to wipe out his staffs, to stun his troops.

For the past three or four months, the marshal had been orchestrating plans for the latest lunge westwards by his 1st Ukrainian Front, striking out of the Sandomierz bridgehead, through Kielce, Radomsko, past the famous religious shrine of Częstochowa, finally coming to a halt on the Oder somewhere near Breslau. A second, lesser thrust would liberate Krakow then continue towards the industrial heartland of Upper Silesia. Joseph Stalin used a single word to impress its importance on his marshal: gold. Konev heeded the message. His build-up for the thrust from the Vistula to the Oder was on a staggering scale. He massed more than 3,500 tanks and self-propelled guns at Sandomierz (plus 400 dummy ones for good measure). There were 17,000 artillery pieces and mortars, more than 900 miles of trenches were dug and 1,100 command and observation posts erected. Some 10,000 bunkers and dugouts were built for the men and 11,000 emplacements were built for guns and mortars. Engineers threw thirty bridges across the Vistula, and more than 1,200 miles of roads were built or improved. With eleven days to go until the beginning of the offensive – 20 January – Ivan Konev was well satisfied with his work. “The main part of the preparation was finished,” he wrote. “As is always the case before major events, a good deal was still to be done.”

Now he received a telephone call. On the other end of the line was the acting Chief of the General Staff, Alexei Antonov. Stalin wanted the offensive brought forward. It would begin not in eleven days’ time, but just three, on Friday, 12 January. The 1st Ukrainian Front, the marshal assured Antonov, would be ready in time.
⁶⁰

As Ivan Konev was telling Moscow he could bring his attack forward, Heinz Guderian was closeted once more with Adolf Hitler at his headquarters near Frankfurt. The files of Guderian’s intelligence staff,
Fremde Heere Ost
– Foreign Armies East – were bulging with evidence of an impending Soviet offensive. That very Tuesday, 9 January, a Russian deserter had described how the attack would begin “in three days” and reach German soil “in a single bound”.
⁶¹
Aerial reconnaissance revealed thousands of Soviet aircraft lined up on the airfields of Poland, poised to strike at the Vistula and East Prussia. “The Soviets no longer have so many planes,” Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring interjected. “They’re simply decoys.”
⁶²
Adolf Hitler concurred. He flew into a rage at the latest predictions of impending doom compiled by Foreign Armies East. Its head ought to be committed to a lunatic asylum, he yelled at Guderian, before finally regaining his composure. He had chided the general long enough. Now he praised him: “The Eastern Front has never possessed such a strong reserve as now. That is your doing. I thank you for it.” Guderian snapped back: “The Eastern Front is like a house of cards.” If it was penetrated at any point, it would collapse. It needed tanks. It needed guns. It needed men. The Führer brushed the general’s protestations aside. “The Eastern Front must help itself and make do with what it’s got.”
⁶³