The Second World War (114 page)

In the forests, the remnants of German formations pushed westwards to escape. They were short of water, and many soldiers became dehydrated in the heat. All suffered from intense stress through fear of ambush by partisans or capture by the Red Army. Bombers and artillery harrying the withdrawal brought down trees, and sprayed them with wood splinters. The severity and ubiquity of the fighting was such that no fewer than seven German generals from Army Group Centre were killed in action.

Even Hitler had to abandon his compulsion to designate totally unsuitable towns as fortresses. His commanders now tried to avoid defending towns for that very reason. By the end of June, the 5th Guards Tank Army had bulldozed its way forward and begun to encircle Minsk from the north.
Chaos reigned in the city as Army Group Centre’s headquarters and all the German rear-area establishments rushed to escape. The badly wounded in the hospitals were abandoned to their fate. Minsk itself was captured from the south on 3 July, and the bulk of the German Fourth Army found itself trapped between the city and the Berezina.

Even a medical Obergefreiter with no access to staff maps could clearly see the bitter irony of their situation. ‘
The enemy
’, he wrote, ‘has now done what we did in ’41: encirclement to encirclement.’ A Luftwaffe Obergefreiter observed in a letter to his wife in East Prussia that he was now only 200 kilometres away from her. ‘
If the Russians keep up
the direction of their attack it will not be long before they are standing at your door.’

Vengeance was exacted in Minsk, especially against any former Red Army soldiers who had served as Hiwis with the Wehrmacht. Others took personal revenge after the savage repression in Belorussia which had killed a quarter of its population. ‘
A partisan, a small man
,’ wrote Grossman, ‘has killed two Germans with a stake. He had pleaded with the guards of the column to give him these Germans. He had convinced himself that they were the ones who had killed his daughter Olya, and his sons, his two boys. He broke all their bones, and smashed their skulls, and while he was beating them, he was crying and shouting: “Here you are–for Olya! Here you are–for Kolya!” When they were dead, he propped the bodies up against a tree stump and continued to beat them.’

The mechanized armies of Rokossovsky and Chernyakhovsky pushed on, while rifle divisions behind crushed the trapped German forces. Soviet commanders knew by now the advantage of a headlong charge when the enemy was in full flight. The Germans should not be allowed time to recover and prepare new defence lines. The 5th Guards Tank Army headed for Vilnius, while other formations went for Baranovichi. Vilnius fell on 13 July after heavy fighting. Kaunas was their next objective. German territory in the form of East Prussia lay just beyond.

The Stavka now planned a strike up to the Gulf of Riga, to trap Army Group North in Estonia and Latvia. The army group struggled desperately to hold open a corridor to the west, while fighting back eight Soviet armies on the east. South of the Pripet Marshes on 13 July, Marshal Konev’s armies of the 1st Ukrainian Front began their offensive later known as the Lwów–Sandomierz Operation. After smashing through weakly held German lines, Konev’s formations advanced to encircle Lwów. Their assault on the city ten days later was helped by 3,000 men of the Polish Home Army, led by Colonel W
adys
aw Filipkowski. But as soon as the city had been seized the
NKVD
, which had already secured Gestapo headquarters and its files, arrested the Home Army officers and forced the soldiers to join the Communist 1st Polish Army.

After taking Lwów Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front headed west all the way to the Vistula, yet it was the thought of Soviet formations approaching East Prussia–‘old Reich’ territory–which struck most fear into German hearts. The only grounds for hope, as in Normandy, were the V-weapons, especially the V-2. ‘
Their effect should be
many times more powerful than the V-1,’ a Luftwaffe Obergefreiter wrote home, but he was not alone in fearing that the Allies would retaliate with gas. One or two even advised their families at home to buy gas-masks if necessary. Others began to fear that their own side ‘might start to use gas (as a last resort)’.

Some German units were pulled back into one defensive line after another in the vain hope of halting the onrush. ‘
The Russians are attacking constantly
,’ wrote a construction company Gefreiter drafted into the infantry. ‘A bombardment has been going on since 05.00 hours. They want to break through. Their ground-attack aircraft are well coordinated with their artillery fire. Impact follows impact. I am sitting in our good bunker and writing what is perhaps the last little letter.’ Almost every soldier was praying privately that he would get home alive, but not really believing it.

Events were moving so rapidly, as an Obergefreiter thrown into another improvised
Kampfgruppe
observed, that ‘
one can no longer
talk of a front’. He went on: ‘I can only let you know that we are now not far from East Prussia, and perhaps then the worst will come.’ In East Prussia itself, civilians observed the busy roads with mounting anxiety. A woman close to the eastern border watched ‘
columns of soldiers and refugees
from Tilsit, which has been heavily bombed’, pass her door. Soviet bombing raids forced civilians to shelter in their cellars, and they had to board up their smashed windows. Workshops and factories had virtually ceased functioning because so few women came to work. Travel over 100 kilometres was forbidden. The Gauleiter of East Prussia, Erich Koch, did not want civilians fleeing westwards, as that would be defeatist.

Konev’s advance continued rapidly from Lublin, where the concentration camp of Majdanek had been discovered just to the west of it. Grossman had joined General Chuikov whose Stalingrad army, now the 8th Guards, had seized the city. Chuikov’s main concern was that he might miss out on the advance to Berlin, which for him was as important as Rome had been to General Mark Clark. ‘
It’s perfect logic
and common sense,’ Chuikov argued. ‘Just think:
stalingradtsy
advancing on Berlin!’ Grossman, disgusted with the egomania of commanders and angry that Konstantin Simonov had been sent to cover the Majdanek story instead of him, moved north towards Treblinka, which had just been discovered.

Simonov was with a large group of foreign correspondents sent to Majdanek by the Main Political Department of the Red Army to witness Nazi crimes. Stalin’s position, with the slogan ‘Do Not Divide the Dead’, was
clear. No mention was to be made of Jews as a special category when it came to suffering. The victims of Majdanek were to be described only as Soviet and Polish citizens. Hans Frank, the head of the Nazi Generalgouvernement, was horrified when details of the extermination facilities at Majdanek appeared in the foreign press. The rapidity of the Soviet advance had taken the SS by surprise, leaving them no chance to destroy the incriminating evidence. It brought home to him and others for the first time that a noose awaited them at the end of the war.

The SS had a little more time at Treblinka. On 23 July, when Konev’s artillery could be heard in the distance, the commandant at Treblinka I received the order to liquidate the last survivors of the camp. Schnapps was issued to the SS and the Ukrainian
Wachmänner
before they began to execute the remaining prisoner work details. Max Levit, a carpenter from Warsaw, was the only survivor. Wounded in the first fusillade, he had been covered by other bodies. He managed to crawl into the forest from where he listened to the ragged volleys. ‘
Stalin will avenge us
!’ a group of Russian boys had cried just before they were shot.

Shortly before Operation Bagration crashed into his armies in the east, Hitler had transferred the II SS Panzer Corps to Normandy, with the 9th SS Panzer Division
Hohenstaufen
and the 10th SS Panzer Division
Frundsberg
. Ultra intercepts had warned the Allied leaders in Normandy that they were on their way. Eisenhower fumed with impatience, because Montgomery’s next offensive against Caen after Villers-Bocage was not ready until 26 June. This was hardly Montgomery’s fault since the great storm had delayed his build-up of forces for what was known as Operation Epsom. He intended once more to attack west of Caen and swing round to encircle the city.

On 25 June a diversionary attack began even further to the west, with XXX Corps renewing its battle with the Panzer Lehr Division. The 49th Division, known as the Polar Bear Division because of its insignia, managed to force the Panzer Lehr back to the villages of Tessel and Rauray, where the fighting was particularly savage. Ever since the 12th SS Panzer Division
Hitler Jugend
had begun killing prisoners, little mercy was shown on either side. Just before the attack on Tessel Wood, Sergeant Kuhlmann, a mortar platoon commander in the 1/4th King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, recorded the orders in his field message book. At the end is written ‘
NPT below rank major
’, which stood for ‘
no prisoners
to be taken below the rank of major’. Others also recalled getting a ‘no prisoners’ order, and claim that this was why German propaganda began to call the 49th Division ‘the Polar Bear Butchers’. An Ultra intercept confirmed that the Panzer Lehr suffered ‘
heavy losses
’.

Montgomery spoke of Operation Epsom to Eisenhower as the ‘showdown’, while clearly having every intention of conducting the battle as cautiously as usual. The official history of the Italian campaign later observed that Montgomery ‘
had the unusual gift
of persuasively combining very bold speech and very cautious action’. This was particularly true in Normandy.

The newly arrived VIII Corps launched the main attack with the 15th Scottish Division and the 43rd Wessex Division in front, and the 11th Armoured Division ready to exploit a breakthrough behind. The opening bombardment combined divisional and corps artillery as well as the main armament of the battleships offshore. The 15th Scottish advanced rapidly, but the 43rd Division on the left found itself having to fight off a counter-attack by the 12th SS Panzer Division. By nightfall, the Scots had reached the valley of the Odon. Although movement was slow because vehicles became dangerously congested on the narrow Norman roads, the advance continued. Next day the 2nd Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, wisely ignoring current tactical doctrine, slipped across the Odon in small groups and captured a bridge.

On 28 June Lieutenant General Sir Richard O’Connor, who had escaped from a prison camp in Italy and now commanded VIII Corps, wanted to push far ahead with the 11th Armoured Division and seize a bridgehead over the River Orne beyond the Odon. General Sir Miles Dempsey, the commander of the British Second Army, knew from Ultra of the imminent arrival of II SS Panzer Corps, and with Montgomery at his elbow decided to play safe. He might have been rather more robust if he had known of the developments on the German side.

Hitler had just summoned Rommel to the Berghof, an extraordinary act in the middle of a battle. To compound the confusion the commander-in-chief of Seventh Army, Generaloberst Friedrich Dollmann, had just died–officially of a heart attack–but most German officers suspected suicide after the surrender of Cherbourg. Without consulting Rommel, Hitler appointed Obergruppenführer Paul Hausser, the commander of II SS Panzer Corps, to take over Seventh Army. Hausser, who had been ordered to counter-attack the British offensive with the
Hohenstaufen
and the
Frundsberg
SS Panzer Divisions, had to hand over to his deputy and hurry to his new headquarters in Le Mans.

On 29 June the 11th Armoured Division, led by its outstanding commander Major General Philip ‘Pip’ Roberts, managed to put its leading tanks on to Hill 112, the key feature between the Odon and the Orne. It then proceeded to fight off counter-attacks by the 1st SS Panzer Division
Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler
, part of the 21st Panzer, and the 7th Mortar Brigade with its Nebelwerfer multi-barrelled launchers, which screamed
like braying donkeys. The Germans recognized the significance of the capture of Hill 112. Urgent orders were passed to Gruppenführer Wilhelm Bittrich, Hausser’s replacement, to attack on the other flank within one hour, using his SS Panzer Corps reinforced with a battle-group from the SS Panzer Division
Das Reich
. The British Second Army thus found itself under attack by seven panzer divisions, including four SS panzer divisions and part of a fifth. At that very moment, the whole of Army Group Centre in Belorussia had just three panzer divisions, and that was after being reinforced. So Ilya Ehrenburg’s sarcastic remark that the Allies in Normandy were fighting the dregs of the German army could hardly have been further from the truth.