capture of Krakow and Radom. Konev, to preserve the mines and factories of Upper Silesia, as Stalin had instructed, decided to commence a semi-encirclement of the industrial and mining region from Katowice to Ratibor while leaving a route of escape for the German forces left in the area. The 3rd Guards Tank Army had been heading for Breslau but, on Konev’s order, wheeled hard left on the march and came back up along the eastern bank of the Oder towards Oppeln. As if organizing a great shoot, Konev brought up the 21st, 59th and 60th Armies to flush the Germans out.
On the night of 27 January, the German divisions of the Seventeenth Army pulled out and fled for the Oder. General Rybalko’s 3rd Guards Tank Army then acted as the guns, catching large numbers of them in the snow- covered landscape. Rybalko’s tanks were camouflaged, rather improbably, with white tulle from a large supply captured in a Silesian textile factory supposedly devoted to total war.
Stalin’s ‘gold’ was secured intact over the next two days. It was a disaster for Germany, as Guderian had warned. Speer’s forecasts for armaments production, presented to the corps commanders at Krampnitz only two weeks before, lay in ruins. He recognized this himself, predicting that Germany could now hold out for a matter of weeks at best. The loss of the mines as well as the steelworks and factories was probably a greater blow for German production than all the Allied bombing of the Ruhr industrial region over the last two years.
Perhaps the most surprising part of the operation was the fact that the German withdrawal was authorized by Fuhrer headquarters. Hitler had sacked General Harpe and replaced him with his favourite commander, General Schorner, a convinced Nazi whose motto was ‘Strength through fear’. Schorner was only satisfied when his soldiers were more afraid of his punishment than they were of the enemy.
The Seventeenth Army managed to withdraw, but relatively few women and children escaped from Upper Silesia. Many, especially the old, stayed out of choice. Sometimes widows refused to leave the grave of a husband, while others could not face leaving farms which had been in their family for generations. They sensed that if they left, they would never return. A Swedish woman who managed to make her way through Soviet lines in a farm cart told the Swedish embassy that although Soviet troops ‘had acted in a correct manner’ in some places, German propaganda stories seemed to be mostly true. She added that this did not surprise her after the way that the Germans had behaved in Russia. Soviet troops were equally ruthless whenever they suspected ‘partisan’ activity. The officers of a rifle company, on finding a Russian soldier from a patrol lying dead in a village street, ‘ordered their men to liquidate the whole population of the village’.
The rapidity of the 1st Ukrainian Front’s advance created its own problems for the Soviet authorities. NKVD rifle regiments for the repression of rear areas were sometimes thrown into battle against bypassed German units. They had to reorganize rapidly, in some cases even having to refer to the Red Army instruction book. In the headlong advance, General Karpov, the commander of the NKVD rifle division following the fighting troops, complained on 26 January to Meshik, the Front’s NKVD chief, that their three regiments were ‘clearly not sufficient for this area which has difficult terrain and is covered with large areas of forest’. They would need even more troops and vehicles to guard their lines of communications and depots when they crossed the Oder.
In Konev’s centre, meanwhile, the 5th Guards, helped by German chaos when faced with Rybalko’s sweeping manoeuvre, managed to seize a bridgehead across the Oder around Ohlau, between Breslau and Oppeln. And Lelyushenko’s 4th Guards Tank Army on the right seized another bridgehead on the west bank of the Oder round Steinau, north-west of Breslau, even though Steinau itself was fiercely defended by ?COs from a nearby training school. His tank crews appear to have made good use of their time before the Vistula offensive began. Lelyushenko had given them intensive target practice on Tiger tanks captured the previous autumn, and their gunnery, seldom a strong point in Red Army tank formations, had improved. They now began target practice on German steamers heading downstream from Breslau.
The Germans, meanwhile, were rushing the 169th Infantry Division to stiffen the defences of the Silesian capital, which Fuhrer headquarters had declared to be ‘Fortress Breslau’. Hitler, on hearing that Soviet troops had established the Steinau bridgehead, ordered General von Saucken and General Nehring to counter-attack immediately, even though their troops had not had a chance to recover and replenish since their hazardous escape from Poland.
Whether or not German refugees from Breslau went down with the steamers sunk by Lelyushenko’s tanks, the fate of women and children who had left the city on foot during the panic-stricken evacuation was terrible. All husbands not already serving in the Wehrmacht were called up for the Volkssturm to defend the city. Wives were therefore left to fend for themselves entirely. All they heard were the loudspeaker vans telling civilians to flee the city. Although frightened, the mothers who did not manage to obtain places on the overcrowded trains took the normal precautions to look after infant children, such as filling a thermos with hot milk and bundling them up as warmly as possible. They took rucksacks containing powdered milk and food for themselves. In any case, they expected after the announcements that the Nazi Party social welfare organization, the NSV, would have prepared some form of help along the way.
Outside Breslau, however, the women found that they were on their own. Very few motor vehicles were leaving the city, so only a lucky few received lifts. The snow was deep on the roads and eventually most women had to abandon their prams and carry the youngest children. In the icy wind they also found that their thermoses had cooled. There was only one way to feed a hungry infant, but they could not find any shelter in which to breast-feed. All the houses were locked, either abandoned already or owned by people who refused to open their door to anyone. In despair, some mothers offered their baby a breast in the lea of a shed or some other windbreak, but it was no good. The child would not feed and the mother’s body temperature dropped dangerously. Some even suffered a frostbitten breast. One young wife, in a letter to her mother explaining the death from cold of her own child, also described the fate of other mothers, some crying over a bundle which contained a baby frozen to death, others sitting in the snow, propped against a tree by the side of the road, with older children standing nearby whimpering in fear, not knowing whether their mother was unconscious or dead. In that cold it made little difference.
Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front, meanwhile, had been progressing even more rapidly in its drive to the north-west. He told his two tank armies to avoid areas of resistance and to advance between seventy and 100 kilometres a day. Yet on 25 January, Stalin rang Zhukov in the afternoon to tell him to rein in. ‘When you reach the Oder,’ he said, ‘you’ll be more than 150 kilometres from the flank of the 2nd Belorussian Front. You can’t do this now. You must wait until [Rokossovsky] finishes operations in East Prussia and deploys across the Vistula.’ Stalin was concerned about a German counter-attack on Zhukov’s right flank from German troops along the Pomeranian coastline, what became known as the ‘Baltic balcony’. Zhukov begged Stalin to let him continue. If he waited another ten days for Rokossovsky to finish in East Prussia, that would give the Germans time to man the Meseritz fortified line. Stalin agreed with great reluctance.
Zhukov’s armies were crossing the region the Nazis had called the Wartheland, the area of western Poland which they had seized after their invasion in 1939. Its Gauleiter, Arthur Greiser, was an unspeakable racist even by Nazi standards. His Warthegau province had been the scene of the most brutal evictions imaginable. Over 700,000 Poles lost everything, their possessions as well as their homes, which were handed over to Volksdeutsch settlers brought in from all over central and south-eastern Europe. The dispossessed Poles had been dumped in the General Gouvernement without shelter, food or hope of work. The treatment of Jews had been even worse. Over 160,000 had been forced into the tiny ghetto in Lodz. Those who did not die of starvation ended up in concentration camps. Just 850 remained alive when the Soviet tanks entered the city.
The Polish desire for revenge was so fierce that Serov, the chief of NKVD of the 1st Belorussian Front, complained to Beria that it interfered with intelligence-gathering. ‘Troops of the 1st Polish Army treat Germans especially severely,’ he wrote. ‘Often captured German officers and soldiers do not reach the prisoner assembly areas. They are shot en route. For example, on the sector of the 2nd Infantry Regiment of the 1st Infantry Division, eighty Germans were captured. Just two prisoners reached the assembly area. All the others had been executed. The two survivors were questioned by the regimental commander, but when he sent them to be interrogated by his intelligence officer, the pair were shot on the way.’
Zhukov’s decision to force forward with his two tank armies paid off. The Germans never had a chance to organize a line of defence. On the right, the 3rd Shock Army, the 47th, the 61st and the 1st Polish Armies advanced parallel to the Vistula and headed between Bromberg and Schneidemuhl to protect the exposed flank. In the middle, Bogdanov’s 2nd Guards Tank Army pushed on, followed by Berzarin’s 5th Shock Army. And on the left Katukov’s 1st Guards Tank Army charged ahead to Poznan. But Poznan was not like Lodz. On reaching Poznan on 25 January,
