peninsula, facing Gdynia in the Bay of Danzig, and the Vistula delta, where they remained down to the capitulation. Overall, between the beginning of February and middle of April Army Group Vistula suffered losses of around 143,000 officers and men killed, wounded or missing.
In East Prussia, the battered forces of Army Group North still comprised thirty-two divisions in early February, twenty-three of them, belonging to the 4th Army, in the heavily fortified Heilsberg pocket, about 180 kilometres long and 50 deep. A second grouping was besieged in Konigsberg, a third, the 3rd Panzer Army, contained on the Samland peninsula. For a brief time in mid-February, intense fighting opened up a corridor from the encircled Konigsberg to Pillau, the last remaining port in German hands in the province. This enabled some civilians in Konigsberg to escape and provisions to be brought in for the garrison. Once the corridor was closed off again, the fate of the remaining inhabitants of Konigsberg was sealed, though capitulation did not follow until 9 April. Meanwhile, the position of the troops in the Heilsberg pocket had worsened sharply. The replacement of Renduli?c by Colonel-General Walter Wei? as Commander-in-Chief Army Group North on 12 March could bring no improvement. By 19 March, the German pocket was reduced to an area of no more than about 30 kilometres long and 10 deep, exposed on all sides to intense Soviet firepower. By the time the last remnants of the 4th Army were transported across the Frisches Haff from Balga, then to safety from Pillau on 29 March, only 58,000 men and around another 70,000 wounded could be rescued out of an original complement of half a million. The eight divisions left on Samland continued to fight on for some weeks until Pillau was eventually taken on 25 April, when the broken and demoralized remainder retreated to the Frische Nehrung. There they stayed—though with further losses through repeated heavy Soviet bombardment—until the end of the war.
On the Oder, the German 9th Army, under General Theodor Busse, sought, with weakened forces, to hold the defences of the heavily fortified town of Kustrin and the designated fortress of Frankfurt an der Oder. Reinforcements were rushed to the area, but could not compensate for the blood-letting in the fierce fighting—the Panzer Division Kurmark alone lost between 200 and 350 men a day—and the Soviets were able gradually to extend their bridgehead. By early March, Kustrin could be supplied only through a narrow corridor, 3 kilometres wide, which was closed off on 22 March. Much of Kustrin fell on 13 March after bitter street-fighting over previous days, but what remained of the fifteen battalions defending the town under the leadership of SS-Brigadefuhrer Heinz Reinefarth—the former police chief in the Wartheland who had also been prominent in the savage brutality used to put down the rising in Warsaw—retreated within the old fortress walls. When an attempted counter-offensive to relieve the siege failed, amid high German casualties, Guderian was made the scapegoat. He became the last Chief of the General Staff to be dismissed by Hitler, on 28 March, when he was replaced by General Hans Krebs. A second attempt to reach Kustrin that same day had to be abandoned after a few hours. Reinefarth ignored Hitler’s order to fight to the last and the garrison of almost a thousand officers and men managed to break out of the encirclement on 30 March, just before Kustrin fell. For this disobedience he was court-martialled and was fortunate to escape with his life.
Further south on the Oder, in Lower Silesia, the Red Army made relatively slow progress. Schorner’s Army Group Centre, comprising some twenty infantry and eight panzer divisions, battled ferociously, though in the end vainly. The Germans fought hard to keep open a corridor to Breslau, though once this was closed by 16 February some 40,000 troops (along with 80,000 civilians) were sealed off in the Silesian capital. Another 9,000 were encircled to the north in Glogau. Tough German resistance was unable to prevent the Soviets reaching the right bank of the Nei?e near its confluence with the Oder by 24 February. In mid-March, a big drive by the Red Army in the Oppeln area overcame fierce fighting to surround and destroy five German divisions. Around 30,000 Germans were killed, another 15,000 captured. When Ratibor fell on 31 March, the last large industrial city in Silesia was lost to the Germans. What was left of Army Group Centre was forced back onto the western reaches of the Nei?e and south-west into the Sudetenland.
On the southern flank of the eastern front, where nineteen infantry and nine panzer divisions were located, the intense fighting around Budapest which had lasted for weeks was finally reaching its denouement. Ferocious street-fighting—ultimately in the sewers—came to an end on 13 February. Between them, the Germans and Hungarians had lost 50,000 men killed and 138,000 captured in the battle for Budapest. Soviet losses were even higher. Heavy fighting continued to the west of Budapest. Hitler insisted, against Guderian’s advice, on a counter- offensive centred on Lake Balaton. A successful outcome, so ran the strategic thinking, would free nine divisions to be sent to the Oder for an eventual counter-offensive there in May. It would also block the Soviet approaches to Vienna. Most crucially, it was vital to the continuation of Germany’s war effort to retain control of the remaining oil wells in the region. Sepp Dietrich’s 6th SS-Panzer Army, refreshed since the failure in the Ardennes, was sent down to spearhead the attack, which began on 6 March. The German forces battled their way forwards around 20–30 kilometres over a 50-kilometre stretch, but after ten days, amid heavy losses and exhaustion, the attempt ran out of steam. General Otto Wohler, Commander-in-Chief Army Group South, gave out orders to fight to the last. But even the elite troops of the 6th SS-Panzer Army preferred retreat to pointless self-sacrifice. The orders were disobeyed as Dietrich’s men fought their way back westwards into Austria in some disarray, narrowly avoiding complete destruction, but abandoning much heavy equipment as they went. In blind fury, Hitler ordered that Sepp Dietrich’s units, including his own bodyguard, the ‘Leibstandarte-SS Adolf Hitler’, should be stripped of their armbands in disgrace. Even General Hermann Balck, the tough panzer commander in Hungary, who himself had telephoned Guderian to request action be taken against intact units of the Leibstandarte retreating with all their weapons, thought the degradation too harsh a punishment.6 Worse than the prestige issue of the armbands, from a German perspective, was that by the end of March the oilfields were lost, along with the whole of Hungary. The Austrian border now lay directly in the path of the Red Army.
By the end of March, the Red Army had made significant headway on all parts of the eastern front. Berlin was now under imminent threat. In the west, too, February and March saw German defences put up stiff opposition, but ultimately crumble as the western Allies were able to cross the Rhine, the last big natural barrier protecting the Reich, and advance deep into Germany itself.
By February 1945, Germany’s western front was defended by 462,000 soldiers in fifty-nine divisions (about a third as many as on the eastern front). These were hopelessly outnumbered by the forces of the western Allies, who by this time had more than 3.5 million men on the European continent. The German divisions were smaller than earlier in the war, on average just under 8,000 men, and the actual fighting strength of each of them only about half that number—many of them young recruits, already worn down by constant fighting. Tanks, artillery and aircraft, like manpower, had had to be sacrificed for the eastern front. It was made clear to the commanders of the western army groups—Army Group H in the north under Colonel-General Johannes Blaskowitz (who had replaced Colonel-General Kurt Student on 28 January), Army Group B in the centre of the front under Field-Marshal Walter Model, and Army Group G in the south led by Colonel-General of the Waffen-SS Paul Hausser—that, given the situation in the east, they could reckon with reinforcements of neither men nor
Before the Allies could tackle the crossing of the Rhine, they faced tenacious defences west of the great river from north to south. In Alsace, French and American troops had already forced the Germans back across the Rhine near Colmar in early February. The main Allied attack began, however, further north, on 8 February. Despite initial slow progress against fierce resistance, abetted by bad weather and the opening of dams to hamper tank and troop movements, Canadian and British forces pushing south-eastwards from the Nijmegen area and Americans pressing north-eastwards from around Duren took Krefeld on 2 March and by 10 March had encircled nine German divisions near Wesel, capturing 53,000 prisoners, though many German troops were nonetheless able to retreat over the Rhine, destroying the bridges as they went. By this time, once the Americans had reached the Rhine south of Dusseldorf on 2 March, a long stretch of Germany’s most important river was in Allied hands, and with that a vital artery for delivery of Ruhr coal and steel blocked. On 5 March, American troops broke through weak defences (many manned by the
Farther south, Trier fell on 1 March. General Patton’s 3rd US Army, after struggling since mid-February to
