Berlin: The Downfall 1945

The advanced rifle battalions, supported by self-propelled assault guns, seized the front lines in the Magnuszew bridgehead. The 8th Guards Army and the 5th Shock Army, with heavy artillery support, then broke open the third line. The main barrier beyond was the River Pilica. Zhukov’s plan was for rifle divisions to seize crossing places for the guards tank brigades following on behind.

The right-hand tank brigade of Bogdanov’s 2nd Guards Tank Army was one of the first to cross the Pilica. As a lead unit, the 47th Guards Tank Brigade had a variety of support attached, including sappers, self-propelled artillery, motorized anti-aircraft guns, and a battalion of sub-machine gunners mounted in trucks. Its objective was an airfield just south of the town of Sochaczew, an important junction due west of Warsaw. Over the next two days, the brigade charged northwards, destroying columns of fleeing Germans on the way and crushing staff cars ‘with their tracks’.

It took much longer for the 1st Guards Tank Army on the left to break through. Colonel Gusakovsky, a Hero of the Soviet Union twice over, was so impatient after the long wait that when his 44th Guards Tank Brigade reached the Pilica, he refused to wait for the bridging equipment. It appeared to be a shallow stretch of the river, so to save ‘two or three hours’ he ordered his tank commanders first to smash the ice with gunfire, then to drive their vehicles across the river bed. The tanks, acting like icebreakers, pushed the broken ice aside ‘with a terrible thundering noise’. It must have been terrifying for the tank drivers, but Gusakovsky did not seem concerned by such problems. Zhukov too was interested only in getting the tank brigades across so that they could deal with the 25th and the 19th Panzer Divisions. After that, the country lay open ahead.

Things had gone just as well for him at the Pulawy bridgehead on 14 January. The plan was not to bombard the whole line, but simply to blast corridors through it. By that evening they were well on the way to the city of Radom. Meanwhile on the 1st Belorussian Front’s extreme right, the 47th Army began to encircle Warsaw from the north and the 1st Polish Army fought into the suburbs.

In the late afternoon of Monday 15 January, ‘because of the big advance in the east’, Hitler left the Adlerhorst at Ziegenberg to return to Berlin on his special train. Guderian had been forcefully requesting his return for the last three days. At first, Hitler had said that the Eastern Front must sort itself out, but finally he agreed to halt all activity in the west and return. Without consulting Guderian or the two army groups involved, he had just issued orders for the Grossdeutschland Corps to be moved from East Prussia to Kielce to shore up the Vistula front, even though this meant taking it out of the battle for at least a week.

Hitler’s journey by rail to Berlin took nineteen hours. He did not entirely neglect domestic matters. He told Martin Bormann to stay at the Obersalzberg for the time being, where he and his wife kept Eva Braun and her sister Gretl Fegelein company.

Stalin, meanwhile, was in excellent spirits. That same evening, he welcomed General Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Air Chief Marshal Tedder, who had finally arrived in Moscow after long delays in Cairo due to bad flying conditions. Tedder had come to discuss future developments, but Stalin observed smugly that the Ardennes offensive had been ‘very stupid’ of the Germans. He was also particularly pleased that the Germans had retained thirty divisions as ‘a prestige garrison’ in Courland — the remains of Army Group North, which Guderian wanted to bring back to Germany.

The Soviet leader made an effort to charm Tedder. He clearly wanted to convince Eisenhower’s deputy that he had done everything possible by the timing of the Red Army’s great offensive to help them out over the Ardennes. It is impossible to tell whether or not he foresaw that this would help exacerbate the rift between the Americans and the much more sceptical Churchill.

Soviet historians always tried to maintain that Stalin was planning to launch the attack on 20 January, but then, when he received a letter from Churchill on 6 January begging for help, he gave the order the next day to advance the attack to 12 January, even though the weather conditions were unfavourable. This was a gross misrepresentation of Churchill’s letter. It was not a begging letter to save the Allies in the Ardennes. He had already written to say that the Allies were now ‘masters of the situation’ and Stalin knew perfectly well from his liaison officers in the west that the German threat there had collapsed by Christmas. Churchill was simply asking for information on when the Red Army was going to launch its great winter offensive, because the Kremlin had resolutely refused to reply to such requests, even when Soviet liaison officers were kept abreast of Eisenhower’s plans.

The Vistula offensive, planned since October, had been prepared well ahead: one Soviet source even says that it had been possible ‘to start the advance on 8–10 January’. Stalin was therefore more than happy to give the impression that he was saving his allies from a difficult situation, especially when he had reasons of his own for pushing forward the date. Churchill was becoming increasingly concerned at Stalin’s intention to impose on Poland its puppet ‘Lublin government’ made up of exiled Polish Communists controlled by Beria’s NKVD. The Crimean conference at Yalta was imminent and Stalin wanted to make sure that his armies controlled the whole of Poland by the time he sat down with the American and British leaders. His law could be imposed ruthlessly on Polish territory purely because it constituted the immediate rear area to his operational troops. Anyone who objected could be classified as a saboteur or fascist agent. Finally, there was a much more down-to-earth reason for bringing the great offensive forward. Stalin was worried that the predicted change in the weather for the beginning of February would turn hard ground to mud and therefore slow up his tanks.

One aspect of the meeting with Tedder is most revealing. ‘Stalin emphasized,’ the American report states, ‘that one of the difficulties [of the Vistula offensive] was the large number of trained German agents among the Poles, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians and German-speaking Russians. He said that they were all equipped with radios and, as a result, the element of surprise was practically eliminated. However the Russians have succeeded in eliminating this menace to a large measure. He said that he considers the clearance of the rear areas to be just as important as bringing up supplies.’ This gross exaggeration of German-trained stay-behind groups was Stalin’s pre- emptive justification of Soviet ruthlessness in Poland. Beria was also trying to brand the non-Communist resistance, the Armia Krajowa, as ‘fascist’ despite its suicidal bravery in the Warsaw uprising.

The next twenty-four hours proved that the Soviet armies which had broken through the Vistula front were indeed advancing at full speed. Each seemed to outbid the other.

The rapid advances of Zhukov’s tank armies were partly due to the simplicity and robust construction of the T-34 tank and its broad tracks, which could cope with snow, ice and mud. Even so, the mechanic’s skills proved at least as important as cavalry dash, because field workshops could not keep up. ‘Ah, what a life it was before the war,’ a driver remarked to Grossman. ‘There were plenty of spare parts then.’ Once the weather cleared, Shturmovik fighter bombers, known to the Germans as ‘Jabos’ for Fagdbomber, were able to support the headlong advance, as Zhukov had promised his tank commanders. ‘Our tanks move faster than the trains to Berlin,’ boasted the ebullient Colonel Gusakovsky, who had blasted his way across the Pilica.

The small German garrison in Warsaw did not stand a chance. It consisted of engineer detachments and four fortress battalions — one of them was an ‘ear battalion’ made up of hearing casualties recycled back into service. The thrust of the 47th Guards Tank Brigade up to Sochaczew from the south and the encirclement of Warsaw from the north by the 47th Army meant that the garrison lost contact with its parent formation, the Ninth Army.

General Harpe’s staff at Army Group ‘A’ warned OKH in Zossen on the evening of 16 January that they would not be able to hold the city. Colonel Bogislaw von Bonin, the head of the operations department, discussed the situation with Guderian. They decided to give army group headquarters a free hand in the decision, and Guderian signed the signals log with his usual ‘G’ in green ink. But in the Nachtlage, Hitler’s midnight situation conference, the proposal to abandon Warsaw was reported to Hitler by one of his own staff before Guderian’s deputy, General Walther Wenck, brought the subject up. Hitler exploded. ‘You must stop everything!’ he shouted. ‘Fortress Warsaw must be held!’ But it was already too late and radio communications had broken down. A few days later Hitler issued an order that every instruction sent to an army group had to be submitted to him first.

The fall of Warsaw led to another bitter row between Hitler and Guderian, who were still arguing over Hitler’s decision to move the Grossdeutschland Corps. Guderian was even more furious to hear that Hitler was transferring the Sixth SS Panzer Army not to the Vistula front, but to Hungary. Hitler, however, refused to discuss it. The withdrawal from Warsaw was, in his eyes, a far more burning issue.