Berlin: The Downfall 1945

At the noon conference next day, 18 January, Guderian was given a public dressing-down, but worse was to follow. ‘That evening,’ recounted Colonel Baron von Humboldt of the OKH staff, ‘it was Bonin’s birthday. We were all standing round the map table with a glass of Sekt to congratulate him, when [General] Meisel, the second-in- command of the personnel department, arrived with two Oberleutnants armed with machine pistols. “Herr von Bonin,” he said. “I must ask you to come with me.”’ Two others were arrested with Bonin, Lieutenant Colonel von Christen and Lieutenant Colonel von dem Knesebeck. They were taken off to the Prinz-Albrechtstrasse on Hitler’s direct orders to be interrogated by the Gestapo.

Hitler saw the incident as yet another act of betrayal by the army. As well as sacking General Harpe, he also removed General von Luttwitz from command of the Ninth Army. But the truth was that his monstrous vanity could not allow him to lose a foreign capital, even one which he had totally destroyed. Guderian stood up for his three staff officers, insisting that he be interrogated too since the responsibility for the decision was entirely his. Hitler, longing to indict the general staff, took him at his word. At this most critical stage of the Vistula campaign, Guderian was subjected to hours of interrogation by Ernst Kalten-brunner of the Reich Security Head Office, and Heinrich Muller, the chief of the Gestapo. The two more junior officers were released after two weeks, but Bonin remained in a concentration camp until the end of the war.

The day after Bonin’s arrest, Martin Bormann reached Berlin. The next day, Saturday 20 January, he recorded in his diary: ‘the situation in the east is becoming more and more threatening. We are abandoning the region of Warthegau. The leading tank units of the enemy are approaching Katowice.’ It was the day that Soviet forces crossed the Reich border east of Hohensalza.

Guderian’s wife abandoned Schloss Deipenhof ‘half an hour before the first shells began to fall’. The chief of staff wrote that the estate workers (they were probably resettled Baltic Germans) ‘stood in tears beside her car and many would willingly have accompanied her’. Although there can be little doubt about their desperation to leave, this may not have been due entirely to loyalty to their chatelaine. Rumours of what was happening in East Prussia had already started to circulate.

Soldiers of the Red Army, and its Polish formations especially, were unlikely to feel any more merciful after what they had witnessed in the Polish capital. ‘We saw the destruction of Warsaw when we entered its empty streets on that memorable day, 17 January 1945,’ wrote Captain Klochkov of the 3rd Shock Army. ‘Nothing was left but ruins and ashes covered by snow. Badly starved and exhausted residents were making their way home.’ Only 162,000 remained out of a pre-war population of 1,310,000. After the unbelievably brutal suppression of the Warsaw uprising in October 1944, the Germans had systematically destroyed all the historic monuments of the city, even though none had been used by the rebels. Vasily Grossman made his way through the ruined city to the ghetto. All that remained were the three-and-a-half-metre-high wall topped with broken glass and barbed wire and the Judenrat, the Jewish administrative building. The rest of the ghetto was ‘a single undulating red sea of broken bricks’. Grossman wondered how many thousands of bodies were buried underneath. It was hard to imagine anyone escaping, but a Pole led him to where four Jews had just emerged from their hiding place high above the girders of a tall skeleton of a building.

3. Fire and Sword and ‘Noble Fury’

When General Chernyakhovsky launched his offensive against East Prussia on 13 January, political officers erected signs to arouse the troops: ‘Soldier, remember you are now entering the lair of the fascist beast!’

Chernyakhovsky’s attack did not get off to a good start. The commander of the Third Panzer Army, on the basis of good intelligence, withdrew his troops from the front line of trenches at the last moment. This meant that the massive bombardment was wasted. The Germans then launched some very effective counter-attacks. And in the course of the following week, Chernyakhovsky found, as he had feared, that German defence works on the Insterburg gap cost his armies very heavy casualties.

Chernyakhovsky, however, soon spotted an opportunity. He was one of the most decisive and intelligent of senior Soviet commanders. The 39th Army was making better progress on the extreme right, so he suddenly moved the 11th Guards Army round behind and switched the weight of the attack to that flank. This unexpected thrust between the River Pregel and the River Niemen caused panic in the Volkssturm militia units. It was accompanied by another attack across the Niemen in the area of Tilsit by the 43rd Army. Chaos mounted in the German rear, largely because the Nazi Party officials had forbidden the evacuation of civilians. By 24 January, Chernyakhovsky’s 3rd Belorussian Front was within striking distance of Konigsberg, the capital of East Prussia.

As well as ignoring Stavka instructions when it was necessary, Chernyakhovsky, a tank commander and a ‘master of military science’, was also willing to change approved battle tactics. ‘Self- propelled guns became an integral part of the infantry after the crossing of the Niemen,’ Vasily Grossman noted. At thirty-seven years old, Ivan Danilovich Chernyakhovsky was much younger than most other Soviet commanders-in- chief. He was also something of an intellectual and used to recite romantic poetry with humorous panache to the writer Ilya Ehrenburg. Chernyakhovsky was intrigued by contradictions. He described Stalin as a living example of a dialectical process. ‘It’s impossible to understand him. All you can do is to have faith.’ Chernyakhovsky was clearly not destined to survive into the post-war Stalinist petrification. He was perhaps fortunate to die soon in battle, his faith intact.

Ilya Ehrenburg’s own mesmerizing calls for revenge on Germany in his articles in the Red Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star) had created a huge following among the frontoviki, or frontline troops. Goebbels responded with loathing against ‘the Jew Ilya Ehrenburg, Stalin’s favourite rabble-rouser’. The propaganda ministry accused Ehrenburg of inciting the rape of German women. Yet while Ehrenburg never shrank from the most bloodthirsty harangues, the most notorious statement, which is still attributed to him by western historians, was a Nazi invention. He is accused of having urged Red Army soldiers to take German women as their ‘lawful booty’ and to ‘break their racial pride’. ‘There was a time,’ Ehrenburg retorted in Krasnaya Zvezda, ‘when Germans used to fake important documents of state. Now they have fallen so low as to fake my articles.’ But Ehrenburg’s assertion that the soldiers of the Red Army were ‘not interested in Gretchens, but in those Fritzes who had insulted our women’ proved to be wide of the mark, as the savage behaviour of the Red Army soon showed. And his frequent references to Germany as ‘the Blonde Witch’ certainly did not encourage a humane treatment of German and even Polish women.

Marshal Rokossovsky’s 2nd Belorussian Front attacked north and northwestwards from the Narew bridgeheads on 14 January, the day after Chernyakhovsky. His main task was to cut off East Prussia by heading for the mouth of the Vistula and Danzig. Rokossovsky was uneasy about the Stavka plan. His armies would become detached from both Chernyakhovsky’s attack on Konigsberg and Zhukov’s charge westwards from the Vistula.

The offensive against the German Second Army began ‘in weather which was perfect for the attack’, as the corps commander on the receiving end noted regretfully. A thin layer of snow covered the ground and the River Narew was frozen. The fog cleared at noon, and Rokos-sovsky’s armies were soon supported by constant air sorties. Progress was still slow for the first two days, but once again it was the Soviet heavy artillery and the katyusha rocket launchers which made the first breakthroughs possible. Iron-hard ground also made the shells much more lethal, with surface explosions. The snowy landscape was rapidly scarred with craters and black and yellow scorch marks.

On that first evening, General Reinhardt, the commander-in-chief of the army group, telephoned Hitler, then still at the Adlerhorst. He tried to warn him of the danger to the whole of East Prussia if he were not allowed to withdraw. The Fuhrer refused to listen. The next thing Reinhardt’s headquarters received, at 3 a.m., was the order to transfer the Grossdeutschland Corps, the only effective reserve in the region, to the Vistula front.

Reinhardt was not the only field commander to fulminate against his superiors. On 20 January, the Stavka suddenly ordered Rokossovsky to alter the axis of his advance because Chernyakhovsky had been held up. He was now to attack north-eastwards into the centre of East Prussia, not simply seal the region off along the Vistula. Rokossovsky was concerned by the vast gap opening on his left as Zhukov’s armies headed westwards for Berlin, but in East Prussia, this change of direction took German