Armageddon - Max Hastings [215]
Russian after-action reports on the battle for Königsberg paint a picture of confusion, improvisation and often bloody mistakes among the attackers. In the west and north-west of the city, the Russians were compelled to use flamethrowers and Molotov cocktails to set ablaze buildings in which the defenders had emplaced themselves for a fight to the death. There were frightful “friendly fire” incidents, in which artillery observers lost contact with the infantry, and called down shelling on their own men. Rubble and ditches dug by the Germans made it necessary to manhandle Russian field guns forward under fire, by human exertion alone. A severe shortage of radios hampered communication. There was no room for tactical sophistication here, merely murderous hammering at the German positions line by line, until each in turn collapsed.
When the Russians reached the streets of Königsberg, the first white sheets appeared at shattered windows. Shelling and bombing intensified. In the operating theatre of a German hospital, Dr. Hans von Lehndorff found the lights crashing down on to him from the ceiling after a direct hit. German troops ran back among the buildings, emptying their rifles in futility at the strafing aircraft. Von Lehndorff, whose hospital now lay in no-man’s-land, watched his countrymen re-forming a defence line among ruins behind the once-beautiful lake that stood in front of Königsberg castle. “The further side of the pond looks like a cabbage patch destroyed by hail,” he wrote on 7 April.
One is involuntarily reminded of pictures of Douaumont and other shattered fortifications of the First World War, except that those had been erected specially for war, whereas the Königsberg pond seems to have taken a perpetual lease of civilian quietude. Now it is being completely ravaged. Nerves are beginning to give way among us . . . Lest the idea of suicide become infectious, I gave a little address in the operating theatre on the text “Fear not those which kill only the body, but cannot kill the soul. But fear that which can destroy both body and soul.”
General Lasch, commanding the garrison, at last concluded that no more could be done. He surrendered Königsberg on 10 April. Berlin demanded explanations from Fourth Army’s commander. General Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller had achieved notoriety when he was unwillingly propelled into command six weeks earlier by telling Army Group HQ: “I am a good NCO and I know how to carry out orders, but strategy and tactics are quite beyond me. Just tell me what I ought to do!” Now, Müller signalled: “The reasons for the fall of Königsberg, beyond Russian superiority of men and tanks and aircraft, concerns the morale of our own troops. The impression of the city lit up by flames and strewn with unburied dead dampened the spirits of the defenders. Whether the commander also failed in his duty cannot with certainty be established.” Hitler was uninterested in either rationality or obfuscation. He declared Lasch a traitor, arrested his family and sentenced him in absentia to death by hanging. One hundred and twenty police and SS fought to the end in the old castle, even after the capitulation. In long, wretched columns, 60,526 prisoners and refugees marched out, according to NKVD figures, watched by Russian soldiers who plundered them as they passed. Beria reported that there were 32,573 Germans, 13,054 Soviet citizens—slave labourers—and 13,054 people of other foreign nationalities. Some Volkssturm in civilian clothes were shot out of hand as partisans, just as the Wehrmacht in Russia had executed their counterparts in thousands. The Russians claimed to have killed 42,000 Germans and captured 92,000 prisoners, including 1,800 officers, in the Königsberg operation, but this was probably an exaggeration. Beria announced to Stalin that eight NKVD groups, each of 120, were searching Königsberg for “spies, traitors and collaborators.” These had already detained