Armageddon - Max Hastings [193]
The counter-attacks inside Germany took place in sectors lightly held by the Russians, and lacked the weight to achieve anything beyond local successes. They exerted no influence upon Konev’s latest big push, against the Germans further east in Upper Silesia. This was the last important industrial area in the east which remained in German hands. Konev attacked on 15 March. His men gained a Neisse crossing the following night. Reinforcements began to pour over a pontoon bridge. By 31 March, the Russians had gained Ratibor and Katscher, claiming to have killed some 40,000 German troops and captured a further 14,000. The bulk of Hitler’s forces in the region were able to pull back intact, above all First Panzer Army. But Konev’s left flank was now secure.
Between 12 January and 3 February, the drive to the Oder cost 1st Belorussian Front 77,342 casualties, and 1st Ukrainian Front 115,783—more than twice U.S. losses in the month-long Bulge battle. OKH posted eastern casualties for the months of January and February of 77,000 dead, 334,000 wounded and 192,000 missing—a total of 603,000, at least five times German losses in the Ardennes. Soviet forces in Hungary stood eighty miles from Vienna. Konev was 120 miles from Prague. Zhukov’s spearheads were forty-five miles from Berlin.
Yet, even as the eyes of the world were fixed upon Allied forces approaching Hitler’s capital, further north a vast human tragedy was unfolding. The Soviet drive into East Prussia, northern axis of Stalin’s assault upon Germany, was to cost the lives of up to a million people, and inflicted a wound upon the consciousness of the German people which has never healed.
CHAPTER TEN
Blood and Ice: East Prussia
AN IDYLL SHATTERED
THIS BOOK TRACES a descent into an inferno. Its early pages have described chiefly the lot of soldiers, some of whom endured traumatizing experiences. Hereafter, however, as the pace of the Third Reich’s collapse quickened, the civilian population of Germany began to suffer in a fashion dreadful even to those already familiar with aerial bombardment. Leave aside for a moment questions of guilt, military necessity, just retribution. It is here only relevant to observe that in 1945 more than a hundred million people, who found themselves within Hitler’s frontiers as a consequence of either birth or compulsion, entered a darkening tunnel in which they faced horrors far beyond the experience of Western societies in the Second World War.
The great flatlands of East Prussia extended southwards from the Baltic, between the ports of Danzig and Memel. They had been ruled variously over the centuries by Prussians, Poles, even Swedes, yet the population in 1945 was almost exclusively composed of ethnic Germans, 2.4 million of them, to which should be added some 200,000 Allied prisoners and forced labourers, and many thousands of German refugees from the Baltic states. The 1919 Treaty of Versailles severed East Prussia from the rest of the Reich, by granting Poland a corridor to the sea at Danzig, soon followed by the transfer of the province of Posen to Warsaw’s governance. In September 1939, East Prussians rejoiced when their land link to Germany was restored by Hitler’s Polish invasion.
The region’s character was strongly influenced by its great aristocratic families. “East Prussia was a province very untypical of Germany,” observed Helmut Schmidt, “owned chiefly by the gentry and nobility, in which the ordinary people were dependent peasants. It was a peculiar society, with this very thin upper crust of counts and barons and princes, and beneath them hundreds of thousands of people who possessed barely enough food to live.” Henner Pflug, who worked there as a teacher, said: “The Nazis seemed to take second place in East Prussia. The aristocracy was still on top.” The middle class, such as it was, lived chiefly around the provincial capital of Königsberg. The grandees occupied some wonderfully beautiful country houses,