Armageddon - Max Hastings [336]
In the streets of Danzig, Captain Vasily Krylov watched the manic looting of abandoned shops. “The whole place stank of corpses.” He saw soldiers cheering the discovery of a tanker wagon of alcohol. They emptied their weapons into it until spirits spouted from a hundred holes, then stood open-mouthed beneath the fountains of liquor. Many men, said Krylov, were angered by the splendour in which they perceived the Germans to have been living, the riches of their houses. “They were bitter about what the Germans had done to us, when they saw how Hitler’s people lived at home.” “It was very difficult to maintain order as we advanced into Germany,” admitted Major Fyodor Romanovsky of the NKVD. There was considerable confusion in the upper ranks of the Red Army about the limits of tolerable behaviour. Yelena Kogan’s commanding officer took a call one day in Poznan from a Polish unit complaining that two Russians had raped a local woman. “Shoot them!” ordered the Soviet officer. Kogan observed drily: “His attitude proved to be behind the times. Our colonel did not know what the rest of the army was doing in Germany.”
The old Pomeranian coastal fortress of Kolberg was cut off by the Russians on 4 March. Its garrison consisted of only 3,300 men, mostly stragglers and Volkssturm, commanded by an elderly veteran of German South-West Africa, Colonel Fritz Fullriede. They could call on the support of four broken-down tanks, which had to be towed into action by trucks, and naval gunfire from two destroyers offshore. Fullriede was also obliged to assume responsibility for 68,000 civilians. Russian attacks began on 13 March. Fullriede dismissed calls for Kolberg’s surrender. Warships continued the evacuation throughout the siege, taking off refugees to Swinemünde. It was painfully slow work. Some families killed themselves, despairing of escape. Yet Fullriede’s garrison, at the cost of almost half its strength, held the line until the evacuation of civilians was complete on 16 March. The colonel then achieved a last small miracle, supervising the evacuation of his soldiers from their coastal perimeter only a mile wide and 400 yards deep, early on the morning of 18 March. Fullriede was awarded the Knight’s Cross for what was, indeed, the fulfilment of a heroic humanitarian purpose.
For most of March, 105,000 men of Third Panzer Army retained one major German foothold east of the Oder, a sixty-mile strip of front known as the Altdamm bridgehead, commanded by Hasso von Manteuffel. The Russians attacked here on 14 March. Next day Hitler began systematically stripping Third Panzer Army of troops to reinforce Berlin. Von Manteuffel decided that his position was untenable. He withdrew all his surviving forces across the Oder next night, demolishing the river bridges. On 21 March, the Russians mopped up the survivors in Altdamm town, capturing large quantities of abandoned equipment and armour.
Germany’s generals were stunned by Hitler’s appointment of Heinrich Himmler, whose skills lay solely in the field of mass murder, to military command of the Vistula front late in January. Guderian described Himmler’s role as “preposterous . . . I used such argumentative powers as I possessed in an attempt to stop such an idiocy being perpetrated on the unfortunate Eastern front . . . all in vain.” Once arrived at his headquarters, the Reichsführer SS proved wholly unable to exercise command functions, even with the assistance as his chief of staff of another accomplished killer, SS General Heinz Lammerding, whose men had carried out the Oradour massacre in France. Himmler’s tenure as Vistula commander proved as disastrous as the Wehrmacht had anticipated. On 18 March, Guderian discovered that the SS chief had abandoned his headquarters and was said to be nursing a bad cold in a sanatorium at Hohenlychen. In truth, he had suffered a nervous collapse. Guderian had little trouble persuading Himmler that he should ask to be relieved