Armageddon - Max Hastings [332]
Rokossovsky’s armies swung westwards during March, after gaining all of East Prussia save a few German strongholds. They smashed through West Prussia and Pomerania. Refugees and Wehrmacht soldiers alike were pressed relentlessly back upon the Baltic coast. Hundreds of thousands of them crowded into Danzig. It was defended by the remains of the German Second Army, while behind its positions huddled some 1.5 million refugees, most from East Prussia, together with 100,000 wounded jamming the hospitals. On 12 March, command was entrusted to the tough, effective General Dietrich von Saucken. “He was a son of East Prussia,” in the words of German admirers, “and what mattered to him . . . was the seething mass of refugees, whom he was determined to save from the grasp of the Russians.” The gauleiter of Danzig, Albert Forster, wrote: “I still believe in some kind of miracle. I still believe in Almighty God, who has given us our Führer . . . All that is left is for the West to recognize where its real enemy lies.”
Instead, however, hysteria was overwhelming many of Forster’s people. On 12 March, Russians found sixteen members of three families, including mothers and children aged between two and fifteen, in a shed a few miles outside Danzig. All had had their throats or wrists slashed by one Irwin Schwartz, a prominent local Nazi who said that this had been done at their own request. Some of those involved, who were still alive, persisted with their efforts to die even as a Red Army doctor attempted to save them. Schwartz, who survived cutting his own wrists, said that he had killed his own wife and three children, then offered the same service to his neighbours. “It is better to die than live with the Russians,” he told his interrogators. Fifty-eight women and teenagers killed themselves by slitting their wrists in the town of Mednitz in 1st Ukrainian Front’s sector. The same day, Konev’s headquarters reported to Moscow: “Many Germans in areas we have occupied are dying of starvation.”
On 15 March, six Russian armies began a simultaneous assault on Danzig. At last, the surviving heavy units of the German surface fleet, which had contributed so little to Hitler’s war effort, found a role. The old battleship Schlesien and the cruisers Prince Eugen and Leipzig fired on the Russians from stations offshore, shaking the earth with the impact of their huge shells. The Germans remained faithful as ever to their doctrine of active defence. For four days, the line held. On 19 March, under fierce Russian pressure von Saucken’s positions began to crack. On the 22nd, the first Soviet tanks reached the Baltic north of Danzig. The city centre came within Russian artillery range. A ferocious bombardment began. Civilians descended to the cellars, from which most did not emerge for many days. Russian fire was also raking ships in the harbour which were still attempting to evacuate civilians. A Russian soldier observed with satisfaction that once gunners accustomed to firing at ground targets adjusted to the demands of hitting ships, the results were devastating: “A gun would fire, then came the explosion of the shell, and another craft capsized and went to the bottom with its load of fascists.”
Lieutenant Gennady Ivanov, commanding a Stalin tank troop, found the Danzig fighting as tough as anything he had known in three years of war: “The Germans fought very hard and very well, right up to the end.” Ivanov