seemed devoid of Machiavellian finesse. He had no idea of military strategy yet would hold forth at length, his vast bulk bent across the map table, rendering it invisible to everyone else. Then, having made a fool of himself, he would retire to a chair nearby. An astonishingly long-suffering Hitler did not reprimand him when he went to sleep in full view of everyone present. On one occasion, Freytag von Loringhoven observed Goring fall asleep in a chair. The spare map folded over his face made him look like a pre-war commercial traveller snoozing on a train.
Soviet tank drivers were so exhausted that they too frequently fell asleep, but a T-34 or Stalin tank could clearly withstand rather more than an ordinary vehicle if it blundered into something. The padded leather or canvas tank helmets were certainly needed inside the lurching steel monsters. The crews were kept going to a large degree by the exhilaration of pursuit. The sight of German equipment abandoned brought fierce pleasure. ‘He’s not going to be allowed a chance to rest,’ they swore. They revelled above all in the surprise they were achieving in the German rear.
At the slightest sign of determined resistance, Soviet commanders brought up their heavy artillery. Vasily Grossman observed ‘disciplined German prisoners’ marching themselves to the rear, some still shell-shocked from the massive artillery bombardments. ‘One of them straightens his jacket and salutes every time a car passes,’ he jotted in his notebook.
Zhukov’s armies continued their virtually unopposed thrust north-westwards during the third week of January. The 2nd Guards Tank Army and the 5th Shock Army continued their partnership on the right, while the 1st Guards Tank Army and the 8th Guards Army cooperated closely on the left. Even the 1st Belorussian Front headquarters could not keep up with their progress, sometimes issuing orders for objectives which had already been seized. When General Vasily Chuikov’s 8th Guards Army sighted the industrial city of Lodz on 18 January, five days ahead of schedule, he decided to attack without consulting Front headquarters. But as his rifle divisions deployed for their attack in the morning, they were very nearly bombed by Red Army aviation. The city was in their hands by evening. German soldiers lying dead in the streets had in many cases been killed by Polish patriots, carrying out ‘their merciless but just executions’.
On 24 January, Chuikov, considered the best general for city fighting as a result of his Stalingrad experience, received orders to seize Poznan (Posen). On receiving the signal, he wondered whether Zhukov’s head-quarters knew anything about this massive fortress.
Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front to the south had a much shorter advance to the frontier of the Reich. First of all, they managed to surprise the Germans in Krakow and liberate the city undamaged. But the rapidity of the advance produced unexpected complications as well. Zhukov and Konev’s armies had overtaken tens of thousands of German troops, many of whom had evaded capture and were desperately trying to make their way westwards, hiding up by day in forests. Some of them ambushed passing Red Army men just to seize their bread bags. Meshik, the NKVD chief with Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front, informed Beria that his rifle regiments in charge of rear security were finding themselves in fire-fights with groups of stragglers up to 200 strong.
Large columns of mainly motorized formations also withdrew towards the Reich, trying to find a way through the mass of Soviet armies. They were known as ‘roving cauldrons’, fighting their way or slipping from one encirclement to another, cannibalizing vehicles to keep going and ruthlessly destroying guns and equipment which could no longer be used. The strongest and best known of these was based on General Nehring’s Panzer Corps. They absorbed stragglers and units, and destroyed vehicles which broke down or ran out of fuel. They even sacrificed two tanks to prop up a bridge over which the lighter vehicles rushed before it collapsed. Nehring, helped by the unwitting choice of a route which ran roughly along the boundary between Zhukov’s armies and Konev’s, managed to avoid major engagements. In a brief radio message, Nehring heard that General von Saucken’s
On the same day as Nehring crossed the Oder, the barely believable criminality of the Nazi regime was revealed 200 kilometres to the south-east. Konev’s 60th Army discovered the network of camps round Auschwitz. Reconnaissance troops from the 107th Rifle Division, some on horseback, with sub-machine guns slung across their backs, emerged from snow-laden forests to discover the grimmest symbol of modern history.
Soviet officers, on realizing what they had found, called forward all available medical teams to care for the 3,000 sick prisoners, many too close to death to save. They had been too weak to walk when the SS began to evacuate the camps nine days before. Soviet officers started to question some of the inmates. Adam Kurilowicz, the ex-chairman of the Polish railway workers’ union, who had been in the camp since June 1941, told them how the first tests of the newly built gas chambers had been carried out on 15 September 1941, with eighty Red Army and 600 Polish prisoners. Professor Mansfeld, a Hungarian scientist, told them of the ‘medical experiments’, including injections of carbolic acid, a method used to kill 140 Polish boys. The Red Army authorities estimated that more than 4 million people were killed, although this was later shown to be a considerable over-estimate. An army photographer was summoned to take pictures of the Arbeit-Macht-Frei gateway covered in snow, dead children with swollen bellies, bundles of human hair, open-mouthed corpses and numbers tattooed on the arms of living skeletons. These were all sent back to Aleksandrov, the chief of Red Army propaganda in Moscow. But apart from a report published on 9 February in the Red Army newspaper
A Soviet officer also discovered an order from Himmler agreeing ‘to delay the execution of those Russian prisoners sent to the camps who are physically fit enough for stone-breaking’. That winter, Russian prisoners, ‘many dressed in army shirts or just underwear, and without any hats’, were driven out with sticks and whips in temperatures of minus thirty-five Celsius. The very few who returned alive suffered from extreme frostbite. They could not have survived without medical help, of which there was none. The fact that the Wehrmacht had been handing over prisoners of war, their responsibility, to the SS for extermination could only harden the hearts of the avenging Red Army even more. They even discovered from a German staff interpreter that in at least one camp for Red Army soldiers, ‘all prisoners on arrival were ordered to undress: those declared Jews were shot on the spot’. Once again, the Soviet authorities were interested only in crimes against Soviet citizens and soldiers. For Red Army soldiers, however, the evidence before their eyes sent a clear message. They would take no prisoners.
If those January days were disastrous for the Wehrmacht, they were far more terrible for the several million civilians who had fled their homes in East Prussia, Silesia and Pomerania. Farming families who for centuries had survived the harshest of winters now realized with horror how vulnerable they were. They faced merciless weather, with homesteads burned and foodstocks looted or destroyed in the retreat. Few acknowledged, however, that this had recently been the fate of Polish, Russian and Ukrainian peasants at the hands of their own brothers, sons and fathers.
The ‘treks’ from the regions along the Baltic coast — East and West Prussia and Pomerania — headed for the Oder and Berlin. Those from further south — Silesia and the Wartheland — aimed for the Neisse, south of Berlin. The vast majority of the refugees were women and children, since almost all the remaining men had been drafted into the Volkssturm. The variety of transport ranged from handcarts and prams for those on foot to every sort of farm cart, pony trap and even the odd landau, exhumed from the stables of some schloss. There were hardly any motor vehicles because the Wehrmacht and the Nazi Party had requisitioned them already, as well as all fuel. Progress was pitifully slow, and not just because of the snow and ice. Columns kept halting because carts were overloaded and axles broke. Hay carts, filled with household objects, hams, kegs and jars of food, were turned into covered wagons with a crude superstructure and carpets draped over the outside. Mattresses inside provided some relief to heavily pregnant women and nursing mothers. On icy surfaces, undernourished horses found it hard work. Some carts were hauled by oxen whose unshod hooves were worn raw by the roads, leaving bloodstains in the snow. And when an animal died, as was all too often the case, there was seldom time to butcher it for food. Fear of the enemy drove the refugees on.
At night the columns were directed into wayside villages, where they were often allowed to camp in the barns and stables of manor houses. The owners would welcome in fellow aristocrats fleeing from East Prussia as if they were extra guests arriving for a shooting party. Near Stolp, in East Pomerania, Baron Jesko von Puttkamer slaughtered a pig to help feed hungry refugees on a trek. A ‘short-legged, pot-bellied’ local Nazi official turned up to warn him that slaughtering an animal without permission was ‘a serious offence’. The baron bellowed at him to get off his property, otherwise he would slaughter him too.
