All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [384]
The Russian Drive to the Oder
Early in February, the C-in-C of Army Group Vistula wrote: ‘In the Wehrmacht we find ourselves in a leadership crisis of the gravest magnitude. The officer corps no longer has firm control of the troops. Among soldiers there are the most serious manifestations of disintegration. Examples of soldiers removing their uniforms and exploiting every possible means to acquire civilian clothing in order to escape are far from isolated.’ Further humiliations were heaped upon Germany’s generals: Guderian was interrogated by security chiefs Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Heinrich Müller about his role in the evacuation of Warsaw against Hitler’s orders.
The chief impediment to the Soviet advance was the weather. A sudden thaw slowed to a crawl armoured movement through slush and mud. By 3 February, Zhukov’s and Konev’s armies held a line along the Oder from Kustrin, thirty-five miles east of Berlin, to the Czech border, with bridgeheads on the western bank. On the 5th, Hitler’s commander in Hungary reported: ‘Amid all these stresses and strains, no improvement in morale or performance is visible. The numerical superiority of the enemy, combined with knowledge that the battle is now being fought on German soil, has proved very demoralising for the men. Their only nourishment is a slice of bread and some horsemeat. Movement of any kind is hampered by their physical weakness. In spite of all this and six weeks’ unfulfilled promises of relief, they fight tenaciously and obey orders.’ The Russians acknowledged this with grudging respect in a 2 March intelligence report: ‘Most German soldiers realise the hopelessness of their country’s situation after the January advances, though a few still express faith in German victory. Yet there is no sign of a collapse in enemy morale. They are still fighting with dogged persistence and unbroken discipline.’ Hitler rejected his generals’ urgings to evacuate the beleaguered Courland peninsula on the Baltic, where 200,000 men who might have reinforced the Reich lingered in impotence.
On the central front, the Russians temporarily halted. It is plausible that Zhukov could have continued his advance, exploiting momentum to seize Berlin, but the logistics problems were formidable. Stalin’s armies had no need to take risks. Further north, Rokossovsky pushed on through the snows of Prussia. Russian soldiers derived deep satisfaction from witnessing the destruction they had seen wreaked upon their own homeland now overtaking German territory. One man wrote from East Prussia on 28 January 1945: ‘Estates, villages and towns were burning. Columns of carts, with dazed German men and women who had failed to flee, crawled across the landscape. Shapeless fragments of tanks and self-propelled guns lay everywhere, as well as hundreds of corpses. I recalled such sights from the first days of the war …’ His memories were, of course, of the struggle in Mother Russia. Landowners in East Prussia and Pomerania rash enough to remain in their homes, sometimes because of age or infirmity, suffered terrible fates: to be identified by the invaders not merely as Germans, but also as aristocrats, invited torture before death.
Millions of refugees fled westwards before the Soviets. The strong survived their journeys, but many children and old people perished. ‘At least we were young,’ said Elfride Kowitz, a twenty-year-old East Prussian. ‘We could cope with it better than the old.’ The snowclad landscape of eastern Europe was disfigured by tens of thousands of corpses. Fugitives shared dramas of fantastic intensity which made them briefly companions in adversity, who ate or starved, lived or died, trekked and slept with one another until some new shift of circumstances separated them. ‘In these situations,’ said schoolteacher Henner Pflug, ‘people were thrown together in great intimacy