The Rundstedt offensive reached its limit on Christmas Eve. Today, in the Belgian village of Celles, a swastikaed tank serves as a monument to the Germans’ point of return. But Allied optimism had taken a hard knock. On 4 January 1945, Patton noted in his diary, ‘We can still lose this war. The Germans are colder and hungrier than we are, but they fight better.’
As Patton broke through to relieve Bastogne, American forces in other sectors were pushing the Germans back over territory they had so recently occupied. Clear skies opened German supply lines to intensive air attack. Five thousand Allied bombers took to the air to set ablaze the roads all the way to the Siegfried Line. Rundstedt urged a withdrawal to strong defensive positions but Hitler, still seeing attack as the best defence, ordered a diversionary offensive in the north of Alsace. Operation North Wind would, he calculated, divert Patton from his Ardennes counter-attack, freeing Manteuffel to resume his advance towards Antwerp, the great prize that Hitler refused to accept was now beyond reach. North Wind began on New Year’s Day. It failed utterly.
As German forces gave way in the West there came news of a renewed offensive on the Eastern Front. The sheer overwhelming power of the Soviet attack was a nightmare shock, not least to the civilian population who had clung to the reassurances of the gauleiters that Hitler would never fail them. On four fronts over 4 million men and 9,000 tanks supported by 40,000 artillery pieces confronted a force that was barely half the strength. With his sights on the Vistula river, Marshal Konev lined up his artillery wheel to wheel, with up to 300 pieces for each kilometre of his planned advance. Moved into place under cover of fog and blizzards, the noise of weaponry on the move to its assembly points was covered by deafening music relayed over loudspeakers.
In the early hours of 12 January, the Russian artillery opened up on the Fourth Panzer Army and its right-flanking Seventeenth Army.
The air incandesced with an unnatural light, and before long a sky of fire and smoke lowered over the country on the west side of the Vistula. The frozen soil was torn up hundreds of times over, houses flared like torches, bunkers collapsed, roads were broken up and men were ripped apart.
At first light Konev’s First Ukrainian Army Group braved a heavy fog and a snowstorm that took the breath away to attack across the upper Vistula towards Cracow and Silesia. The first two lines of German defences were overrun in a single day; the third and strongest line, protected by a deep belt of minefields, was crossed a day later. In 48 hours, the Red Army advanced 25 miles on a 37-mile front. Another day extended the front to over 70 miles. Cracow was within striking distance.
The opening offensive in the south was followed by a double attack from two narrow bridgeheads across the Vistula. Marshal Zhukov’s First Belorussian Army Group was able to break through twelve miles of deep defences before fanning out to sweep round Warsaw, opening the way to Berlin. Warsaw, a decimated city, its people and buildings crushed by Nazi vengeance, was taken on 17 January.
Two days after the fall of Warsaw, Cracow and Lodz were captured. The plains of western Poland were now wide open. The Russian tide rolled forward at up to 40 miles a day, sweeping the Germans from Poland, except for the neck of the corridor leading to Danzig. By the end of January, the great industrial region of Silesia, with its tank and aircraft factories little touched by Allied bombing, was in Russian hands.
On 16 January, still unwilling to acknowledge the magnitude of the Soviet offensive, Hitler moved his headquarters to the Chancellery bunker. ‘It was a smart move,’ was the bitter comment of one of his adjutants.
‘You just had to take the suburban train for a short journey from the Eastern to the Western front.’
‘The war is lost,’ declared Albert Speer. He reckoned without the February thaw. ‘The splashing in the gutters sounds to our ears like choirs of angels,’ wrote Wilfred von Oven in his Berlin diary.
The melting snows made the grass airstrips in Poland unusable and turned dirt roads into rushing streams. The smooth-running operation that had kept Russian forces well supplied descended into muddy chaos. The fighting continued but with greater hope on the German side that the Russian advance could be halted and, eventually, reversed.
The defence of East Prussia devolved on General Georg-Hans Reinhardt, who was compelled to spend too much of his time arguing with his Fuehrer about the deployment of forces over a 360-kilometre front. Constructive suggestions from Reinhardt for strengthening the line by withdrawing to stronger natural defences were consistently rejected by Hitler who saw only war maps designed to give a rosy image of the campaign. Frustrated by incompetence at the top, Reinhardt relied increasingly on his own initiative.
As a result, on 13 January, when Marshal Chernyakovsky led the Third Belorussian Front into East Prussia, he had a harder fight on his hands than he expected. After the opening barrage fell on outer defences already vacated by Reinhardt, the Russians came up against stiff opposition from well-prepared forces barring the way to Koenigsberg, the regional capital. But by 20 January the pressure of numbers was overwhelming. Concentrating his strength on the weakest points of the German front, Chernyakovsky’s forces smashed their way through to within striking distance of Koenigsberg, itself close to Pillau, one of the major ports for evacuation. Koenigsberg was awash with refugees who had been pouring in ahead of the Russian advance. In the hospitals 11,000 wounded and injured waited for treatment, mostly in vain.
The civilian population had taken too much time to realise the peril coming to them. Faith in the invincibility of the Wehrmacht, fed assiduously by the Nazi propaganda machine, supported a policy of ‘wait and see’. It was not until convoys of troops, recently cheered on their way to the front, came racing back through towns and villages that panic took hold. In temperatures well below freezing and with heavy snowstorms slowing the bedraggled processions of horse and hand carts, the fear was of being overtaken by Russian tanks making speedy progress over flat frozen ground.
Most at risk were the indigenous Germans of East Prussia, where they formed the large majority. But elsewhere on the Baltic there were many of German antecedents who had done well out of the war at the expense of their fellow Estonians, Latts, Lithuanians and Finns. But whatever their national allegiance, few were prepared to take their chances with a military bent on wiping out the memory of humiliating defeats earlier in the war. The Wehrmacht had been none too scrupulous in its first encounters with the Red Army. Now that fortunes were reversed, revenge was the driving force. Those who suffered the attentions of the triumphant Red Army were liable to greet death as a welcome release.
German propaganda made the most of Russian atrocities, hoping to build up a tide of fury that would stiffen resistance. Pictures of the massacre at Nemmersdorf, an East Prussian village recaptured by the Wehrmacht, were shown widely in print and at cinemas. But the results were not at all what Goebbels intended. Though Nemmersdorf entered the public imagination as a symbol of Soviet barbarism, the rapes and the murders in cold blood of between 60 and 70 civilians instilled not so much a desire for retaliation as a fear of suffering the same fate.
A panic to escape took hold of entire communities. Before long, the great East Prussian migration stretched back from Koenigsberg and Pillau to the Oder River, 250 miles of snowbound roads and tracks. ‘In endless procession the horse-drawn wagons moved, at times three abreast. Beside them, men and women dragged along on foot.’ No one could possibly make an accurate count but it was a fair guess that over 2 million refugees were on the move. Among those who took night shelter from Russian artillery at Kahlberg to the north of Koenigsberg was a woman who had just lost her child. A family she had met on the way stayed with her.
The young woman whose child had died complained of fever and pain in her back. In the morning, her pain was so violent that they could not go on. They stayed in the dunes, listening to the distant rumble of the Russian artillery, afraid the Russians might break through to the Gulf of Danzig and cut them off.
In the afternoon the young woman died without another word. They made a bier of branches, and buried her in a shallow grave in the sand. Then they moved on. They passed a heap of nearly fifty vehicles lying about on the road, tipped over, shattered, or burned. Among them dead horses, and people trying to repair or salvage. An air attack had hit them last night. Some army trucks stood nearby, burnt to a crisp – probably they had called down the catastrophe.
On 23 January, the Red Army reached the mouth of the Vistula where it joined the sea at Elbing. This cut the land route between East Prussia and the West. After the departure of the last refugee train the only cross-country escape was over the frozen Vistula Lagoon to Danzig or Gotenhafen. Under frequent attack by Soviet bombers and fighter aircraft, without camouflage or shelter, thousands began the long trek. With overladen heavy wagons the chance had to be taken that the ice would bear the weight. It was a gamble that too often failed.
The ice groaned and creaked. To the right and to the left lay the victims of other days: sunken wagons with all their load, the frozen carcasses of horses – and some men and women, dead, grotesquely twisted. The girl tried to look straight ahead. But she saw it all.
Soft parts of the ice had been covered with planks. But that meant little. The girl passed wagons that had broken through not more than an hour ago. There were many stops – more vehicles broke through the ice, they were being unloaded and, if possible, pulled out again.
The wagon ahead of her broke through after half an hour. One of the women who had walked alongside had fallen into a hole – now they were fishing for her with poles. The coachman had cut the harness of the horses, and the dripping animals were trying to struggle out of the water in deadly fright. But the wagon was lost. She and those who followed drove round it.
At seven o’clock Russian planes swooped down on them. They attacked further ahead. She saw them dive, and heard the clatter of the machine guns and the dull explosions of their small bombs. There was a panic, horses tore loose, distance was not kept, and a whole row of wagons broke through the overburdened ice. Some horses drowned. The shrill voices of women called for help. Some women, silent with a despair beyond words, circled round holes in the ice that had swallowed a child, a mother, a husband. Or they ran to the next wagon and, on their knees, begged: ‘Please don’t leave us …’ But who could help among all those who barely got their own carts through?
If an exodus by land was all but impossible, there remained the chance of an escape across the sea, assuming, of course, that ships could be made available to lift the host of refugees now congregating along the shore. As the land route closed, Doenitz gave the order to begin evacuation by sea to ports beyond Soviet reach. Codenamed Hannibal, it was to become the biggest ever seaborne rescue.
