Armageddon - Max Hastings [184]
A bizarre little episode of this period concerned a Soviet general named Mikahylov. A man in his forties, he possessed a much younger wife. Returning unexpectedly to Moscow, he found her with a young captain and a newborn baby. He was overcome with despair. “O blad! Generals na kapitana zamyenila!” he said drunkenly one night, back with his division, “What a whore! She prefers a captain to a general!” A few days later, Mikahylov personally led a suicidal assault on the German lines. He was badly wounded, but survived to become a Hero of the Soviet Union. “If we could have made good use of all the futile heroic deeds we witnessed, we could have won five wars,” Major Yury Ryakhovsky mused sardonically.
Konev took Cracow on 19 January, before the Germans had time to demolish it. Next day, the first Russian troops crossed the German border east of Breslau, pushing for the city. On the southern flank in Upper Silesia, the German Seventeenth Army possessed only seven feeble divisions, 100,000 men, to hold a front of seventy miles in an industrial region which contained the most important mines and factories left in Hitler’s empire. Konev had been ordered by Stalin to do his utmost to secure the area intact. The marshal launched his forces upon a grand envelopment, while simultaneously pressing the Germans frontally. Schörner recognized that Upper Silesia was untenable. He ordered a wholesale retreat. The field-marshal telephoned Hitler and told him: “If we don’t pull out, we’ll lose the whole army . . . We’re going back to the Oder.” Hitler stunned his staff by acceding without protest. He knew that if Schörner, most blindly loyal of his commanders, said that the line could not be held, he must be believed. By 29 January, the Russians had overrun all of Upper Silesia. They had also taken Auschwitz.
Red Army signaller Yulia Pozdnyakova was one of those sent to help the doctors coping with the 7,600 survivors of the largest death camp in Hitler’s empire. The ovens had been cold for ten days, but the stench of death lingered, though at first the girl did not recognize this for what it was. She gazed upon the great heaps of children’s shoes, the hoards of human hair, the mass of files and paperwork in the camp offices, and was perplexed that the Germans had left behind such a gigantic collection of documentation and evidence about their unspeakable actions there, not least 348,820 men’s suits and 836,255 women’s coats and dresses. As she sorted through clothing and papers, “I felt somehow guilty that I was touching all these things. The ghosts of the dead were all around us. It was very hard to sleep at night. For weeks afterwards, I could not stand the smell of fried meat.” Each night when they returned to their billets, they heated water and scrubbed themselves desperately, seeking to wash from their bodies the taint of genocide.
It is curious that, though Konev was told what his men had found at Auschwitz, he did not trouble to visit the camp for himself. The marshal said after the war that his duties on the battlefield did not permit him to “abandon myself to my own emotion.” It seems more plausible to suppose that any Rus-sian who had lived through the mass murders of Stalin was incapable of excessive sentiment in the face of those perpetrated by Hitler. Moscow made no public announcement about Auschwitz, or about what had been found there, until after the war ended.
On 14 January, Guderian ordered the mobilization of the Volkssturm along the entire length of the Eastern Front. The military value of this measure was negligible. It was quickly found necessary to mingle the VS with regular army units in forward positions. “Used in isolation [the Volkssturm] possesses only limited military value and can be quickly destroyed,” Hitler himself acknowledged in a general order of 27 January. The consequences of the VS mobilization were disastrous