Berlin: The Downfall 1945

volunteers treated ‘Soviet prisoners of war with more cruelty than the Germans’. Some of the guards were said to have been Volga Germans. They ordered prisoners to strip and set dogs on them. The Germans had apparently carried out ‘a massive propaganda’ attempt to persuade prisoners to join the ROA, General Vlasov’s army of former Soviet soldiers in Wehrmacht uniform. ‘Many Ukrainians and Uzbeks sold themselves to the Germans,’ stated a prisoner. He was described as an ‘ex-Party member’ and ‘former senior lieutenant’. This was because members of the Red Army were stripped of all status simply for having allowed themselves to be taken prisoner.

The punishments inflicted on Soviet prisoners included forcing them to do knee-bends for up to seven hours, ‘which completely crippled the victim’. They were also made to run up and down stairs past guards armed with rubber truncheons on every landing. In another camp, wounded officers were placed under cold showers in winter and left to die of hypothermia. Soviet soldiers were subjected to the ‘saw-horse’, the eighteenth-century torture of strapping a prisoner astride a huge trestle. Some were made to run as live targets for shooting practice by SS guards. Another punishment was known as ‘Achtung!’ A Soviet prisoner was made to strip and kneel in the open. Handlers with attack dogs waited on either side. The moment he stopped shouting, ‘Achtung! Achtung! Achtung!’ the dogs were set on him. Dogs were also used when prisoners collapsed after being forced to do ‘sport marches’, goose-stepping in rapid time. It may have been news of these sorts of punishment which inspired similar practices against German prisoners taken by Soviet troops in their recent advances. An escaped British prisoner of war, a fighter pilot, picked up by a unit of the 1st Ukrainian Front and taken along, saw a young SS soldier forced to play a piano for his Russian captors. They made it clear in sign language that he would be executed the moment he stopped. He managed to play for sixteen hours before he collapsed sobbing on the keyboard. They slapped him on the back, then dragged him out and shot him.

The Red Army advanced into German territory with a turbulent mixture of anger and exultation. ‘Everybody seems to have German harmonicas,’ noted Grossman, ‘a soldier’s instrument because it is the only one possible to play on a rattling vehicle or cart.’ They also mourned their comrades. Yakov Zinovievich Aronov, an artilleryman, was killed near Konigsberg on 19 February. Shortly before his death he wrote a typical soldier’s letter home: ‘We are beating and destroying the enemy, who is running back to his lair like a wounded beast. I live very well and I’m alive and I’m healthy. All my thoughts are about beating the enemy and coming home to you all.’ Another of his letters was much more revealing, because it was to a fellow soldier who would understand. ‘I love life so much, I have not yet lived. I am only nineteen. I often see death in front of me and I struggle with it. I fight and so far I am winning. I am an artillery reconnaissance man, and you can imagine what it is like. To make a long story short, I very often correct the fire of my battery and only when shells hit the target, I feel joy.’

Aronov was killed ‘one foggy Prussian morning’, wrote his closest friend to the dead boy’s sister Irina. The two of them had fought together all the way from Vitebsk to Konigsberg. ‘So, Ira, the war has separated many friends and a lot of blood has been shed, but we comrades in arms are taking vengeance on Hitler’s serpents for our brothers and friends, for their blood.’ Aronov’s body was buried by his comrades ‘on the edge of the forest’. Presumably its site was marked like others by a stick with a small bit of red rag tied to it. If refound by the pioneers responsible, it would be replaced by a small wooden plaque. There were too many bodies spread too widely for reburying in cemeteries.

Red Army soldiers were also marked by their encounters with slave workers, attempting to return home. Many were peasant women with knotted headkerchiefs covering their foreheads and wearing improvised puttees for warmth. Captain Agranenko, the dramatist, encountered a cart full of women in East Prussia. He asked who they were. ‘We are Russian. Russian,’ they answered, overjoyed to hear a friendly voice. He shook hands with each one of them. An old woman suddenly began to cry. ‘It is the first time in three years that someone has shaken my hand,’ she explained.

Agranenko also encountered ‘a beauty from the region of Orel called Tatyana Khilchakova’. She was returning home with a two-month-old baby. In the German camp for slave labourers she had met a Czech and fallen in love with him. They had exchanged marriage vows, but when the Red Army arrived, her Czech had immediately volunteered to fight the Germans. ‘Tatyana does not know his address. He does not know hers. And it is unlikely that the war will ever throw them together again.’ Perhaps, even more unfortunately, she would probably be made to suffer on her return home to Orel for having had relations with a foreigner.

The chief concern for the Stavka at this time continued to be the wide gap across the ‘Baltic balcony’ between Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front and the left flank of Rokossovsky’s 2nd Belorussian Front. On 6 February, Stalin had rung Zhukov from Yalta. He asked what he was doing. Zhukov replied that he was in a meeting of army commanders to discuss the advance on Berlin from the new Oder bridgeheads. Stalin retorted that he was wasting his time. They should consolidate on the Oder, and then turn north to join up with Rokossovsky.

Chuikov, the commander of the 8th Guards Army, who appears to have resented Zhukov since Stalingrad, was contemptuous that Zhukov did not argue forcefully for a push on Berlin. The bitter debate continued well into the post-war years. Chuikov argued that a rapid push at the beginning of February would have caught Berlin undefended. But Zhukov and others felt that with exhausted troops and serious supply shortages, to say nothing of the threat of a counter-attack from the north on their exposed right flank, the risk was far too great.

In East Prussia, meanwhile, German forces were contained but not yet defeated. The remains of the Fourth Army, having failed to break out at the end of January, was squeezed in the Heiligenbeil Kessel, with its back to the Frisches Haff. Its main artillery support came from the heavy guns of the cruisers Admiral Scheer and Lutzow, firing from out in the Baltic across the sandbar of the Frische Nehrung and the frozen lagoon.

The remnants of the Third Panzer Army in Konigsberg had been cut off from the Samland Peninsula, but on 19 February, a joint attack from both sides created a land corridor which was then bitterly defended. The evacuation of civilians and wounded from the small port of Pillau at the tip of the Samland Peninsula was intensified, but many civilians feared to leave by ship after the torpedo attacks on the Wilhelm Gustloff and other refugee ships. In the early hours of 12 February, the hospital ship General von Steuben was torpedoed after leaving Pillau with 2,680 wounded. Almost all were drowned.

The Second Army, meanwhile, had been forced back towards the lower Vistula and its estuary, defending Danzig and the port of Gdynia. It formed the left flank of Himmler’s Army Group Vistula. In the centre, in eastern Pomerania, a new Eleventh SS Panzer Army was being formed. Himmler’s right flank on the Oder consisted of the remnants of General Busse’s Ninth Army, which had been so badly mauled in western Poland.

Himmler seldom ventured out of his luxurious special train, the Steiermark, which he had designated his ‘field headquarters’. The Reichsfuhrer SS now realized that the responsibilities of military command were rather greater than he had imagined. His ‘insecurity as a military leader,’ wrote Colonel Eismann, ‘made him incapable of a determined presentation of the operational situation to Hitler, let alone of asserting himself. Himmler used to return from the Fuhrer situation conference a nervous wreck. Staff officers received little pleasure from the paradox that the feared Himmler should be so fearful. His ‘servile attitude’ towards Hitler and his fear of admitting the disastrous state of his forces ‘caused great damage and cost a vast amount of unnecessary blood’.

Himmler, seeking refuge in the Fuhrer’s own aggressive cliches, talked of more counter-attacks. Following the Demmlhuber debacle, Himmler set his mind on establishing the so-called Eleventh SS Panzer Army. In fact the whole of Army Group Vistula in the early days contained only three under-strength panzer divisions. At best, the formations available constituted a corps, ‘but panzer army’, observed Eismann, ‘has a better ring to it’. Himmler had another motive, however. It was to promote Waffen SS officers on the staff and in field command. Obergruppenfuhrer Steiner was named as its commander. Steiner, an experienced soldier, was certainly a much better choice than other senior Waffen SS officers. But he did not have an easy task.

General Guderian, determined to keep a corridor open to the edge of East Prussia, argued at a situation conference in the first week of February that an ambitious operation was needed. He was even more outspoken than usual that day, having drunk a certain amount at an early lunch with the Japanese ambassador. Guderian wanted a pincer movement from the Oder south of Berlin and an attack down from Pomerania to cut off Zhukov’s leading armies. To assemble enough troops, more of the divisions trapped uselessly in Courland and elsewhere needed to be brought back by sea and the offensive in Hungary postponed. Hitler refused yet again.

‘You must believe me,’ Guderian persisted, ‘when I say it is not just pig-headedness on my part that makes