Duffy Christopher. Red Storm On The Reich (ENG)
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The exploitation force on Zhukov's right-central axis was the
Second Guards Tank Army, a massive formation whose de-
ployment covered an area about fifteen kilometres wide and
fifty to sixty deep. Its path across the lower Pilica had been
cleared by the Fifth Shock Army, as we have seen, and it was
able to cut north-west and begin rapid progress in the direction
of Sochaczew, which was an important road and rail junction
behind Warsaw. The Polish capital was threatened simulta-
neously from the north, where the Forty-Seventh Army had
sprung into life and forced the Vistula downstream of the city.
Meanwhile on the left-hand axis of the Soviet breakthrough
in Poland, the Third Guards Tank Army of Konev's 1st Ukrain-
ian Front was exploiting in the German rear, while the Fourth
Tank Army was fighting through and around the city of Kielce.
By the end of 15 January the two Soviet Fronts had made a
clean breach through the German tactical zone of defence. They
were linking up their Vistula bridgeheads along a frontage of
five hundred kilometres, and on most sectors their tank armies,
tank corps and mechanised forces were advancing through
open country up to a hundred kilometres beyond the start lines
of the offensive. German Army Group A had lost all cohesion.
Units and formations were engulfed without trace, and the
remnants were split into disconnected fragments and were
fighting for their lives.
CHRISTOPHER DUFFY
78
CHAPTER 6
The First German Response
The Moves of Grossdeutschland
and the Sixth SS Panzer Army
BY 15 JANUARY not even Hitler could pretend any more that the
Eastern Front could 'make do with what it's got.' That day was
the last of his sojourn at Ziegenberg in the Hessian woods.
Guderian was far distant, and without asking for his advice,
the Führer ordered two divisions of the Grossdeutschland Pan-
zer Corps down from East Prussia to the scene of the fighting
at Kielce.
The formations concerned were first-class—the Hermann
Goring Parachute Division ('Parachute' being an honorific) and
the Brandenburg Panzer-Grenadier Division—and in a con-
ventionally paced campaign there might have been something
to be said for such a redeployment. Guderian was aghast, for
in the present circumstances the transfer weakened the German
forces in East Prussia just when they were coming under heavy
Soviet pressure (see p. 169), and yet Grossdeutschland would
probably arrive too late to plug the gap in south-central Poland,
where things were already out of control.
Guderian expressed himself with as much vehemence as the
roundabout communications between Ziegenberg and Zossen
would allow, and the relations between Hitler and his chief of
staff were already strained by the time the Führer returned to
Berlin on the sixteenth and installed himself in the Chancellery
bunker. 'Berlin is very convenient as a headquarters,' com-
mented one of Hitler's SS adjutants. 'You just have to take the
79
suburban train for the little journey from the Eastern Front to
the Western' (Paul, 1978, 55).
Hitler's order to entrain had gone out early on the fifteenth.
The intention was for Grossdeutschland to close the breach on
the sector of the Fourth Panzer Army facing Konev's Front, but
the corps came nowhere near its destination. The railway com-
munications between East Prussia and Poland were poor.
Worse still, the staggered start of the Soviet offensive (with
Konev attacking on the 12th, and Zhukov further north on the
14th) meant that Grossdeutschland was still moving south
when it was hit in its left flank by the 1st Belorussian Front.
The stations along the way were already crowded with ethnic
German refugees, and the waggonloads of troops and vehicles
were in the nightmarish situation of having to detrain by dribs
and drabs in the neighbourhood of Lodz in the path of Zhukov's
Front, which immediately brought them under fire:
Their leader was General von Saucken, a lanky individual
of medium size, who was an old East Prussian cavalryman.
The eighteenth of January found him in front of a textile
factory on the outskirts of Lodz. He was scanning the snow-
' covered terrain with his binoculars. Behind him the flight [of
the ethnic German civilians] from the city had begun. Here
and there Soviet tanks were pushing forward, and little white
clouds of snow showed where their shells were landing.
(Thorwald, 1950, 80)
Dietrich von Saucken could see that he was unable to carry out
his mission in southern central Poland, for the First Guards
Tank Army was sweeping down from the north and about to
cut his most direct path of retreat. He accordingly threw out
his forces in a screen east and south of Lodz, and hung on as
long as he could so as to cover the shattered forces of the Ninth
Army. When his time finally ran out he broke through to the
south-west and made his way to the Warthe River, where he
received Nehring's 'roving cauldron' on 22 January (see p. 86).
CHRISTOPHER DUFFY
80
The combined force then made good its escape to the Oder and
joined the formations defending the heartland of the Reich.
Grossdeutschland was just a corps, though a very fine one.
Guderian was still more concerned about the destination of the
Sixth SS Panzer Army, which had become disposable after the
end of the Ardennes offensive. This was a reserve on the grand
operational scale, and Guderian wanted to retrieve it for the
main Eastern Front, utilising the several railway tracks which
led to Berlin.
Guderian went to Hitler in the Chancellery on 16 January
and found that the Führer was determined to send the Sixth
SS Panzer Army all the way to Hungary to safeguard the oil
wells and refineries. The railway routes in this direction were
roundabout and limited, but Hitler insisted on having his way.
The discussion was stormy, and not just on this account but
because Hitler was furious at what had already happened in
Poland. He announced that he was going to dismiss Colonel-
General Harpe and replace him as commander of Army Group
* A with Colonel-General Ferdinand Schörner, a fanatical, brutal
and energetic individual who was utterly devoted to the Führer.
The Saga of Nehring's 'Roving Cauldron'
There is something unreal and abstruse about discussing war
at the purely operational level. The day-to-day reality for the
Germans in Poland was that of a fight for survival by harried
or cut-off units and formations which had lost all communi-
cation with the High Command. Most of the isolated German
forces were eventually wiped out by the Soviet rifle troops,
who came up in the Russian second echelon, but others coa-
lesced into battle groups which tried to escape through the gaps
between the Soviet armoured spearheads. These became
known as 'roving cauldrons' and they were called after the
senior officer present. The German talent for improvisation
showed to the best advantage at this level of command.
RED STORM ON THE REICH
81
The most famous of the 'roving cauldrons' was the group of
General Walther Nehring, whom we left facing the 1st Ukrain-
ian Front in the neighbourhood of Kielce. We shall therefore
follow his story in a little detail. Nehring commanded the XXIV
Panzer Corps, which was built around the 16th and 17th Panzer
Divisions. On 15 January very little was clear to him except that
he was cut off or would shortly be so. He fought on in the area
of Kielce until the snowy night of 16-17 January, when he broke
out to the north-west. He wrote later:
It was obvious to everyone that only by holding together
would we all reach our destination. To split into individual
groups would have spelt death or captivity. Comradeship,
discipline and self-sacrifice were still in evidence, but the
physical demands were extreme, and many of our fellows
died under the ordeal. (Ahlfen, 1977, 56-57)
Nehring was lucky enough to encounter a fuel convoy at the
outset of his journey, and he filled the tanks of his vehicles to
overflowing. As a matter of principle, he now avoided all un-
necessary contact with the Soviet forces and moved by night,
following paths and woodland tracks. In the daytime the troops
bivouacked, while the tanks were hidden, as far as possible,
among houses and barns.
Early on 18 January Nehring arrived about forty kilometres
north of Kielce and found that a strong Russian force was ad-
vancing from the Pulawy bridgehead and barred his intended
path of escape to the north (see p. 72). He broke contact and
made westwards—a direction which fortunately coincided with
the approximate boundary between the Fronts of Konev and
Zhukov. During the course of the day the path of the XXIV
Panzer Corps converged with that of the disorganised and hard-
pressed infantry of the LXII Army Corps, which was escaping
from the pocket between the Sandomierz and Pulawy bridge-
heads. Nehring was at last repaid for his wait at Kielce, but out
of the five divisions of that corps only the 342nd (Major-General
CHRISTOPHER DUFFY
82
Heinrich Nickel) retained any fighting capacity. Together with
the 16th Panzer Division it formed Nehring's main striking
force. The commander of LXII Corps, General Hermann Reck-
nagel, came under Nehring's direction, but was killed five days
later.
On the night of 18-19 January the roving cauldron estab-
lished its first contact of any kind with the outside world. Using
a Luftwaffe radio, Nehring's staff was able to hold a brief con-
versation with Luftwaffe General Seidemann at Posen. Seide-
mann himself had no idea where the Russian forces or the
German positions were, but he in turn notified Guderian, who
alerted the newly arrived Grossdeutschland Corps to be on the
lookout for Nehring.
The twentieth brought the lost command to the fifty-metre-
wide barrier of the Pilica. The details of the accounts are con-
tradictory, but in essence the Germans beat off an armoured
thrust and arrived at a small bridge which Nehring had detected
on his map between Sulechow and Tomaszow. The Germans
reinforced this flimsy structure with tree trunks, which per-
mitted trucks and light armour to cross. The last force to make
the passage was the rearguard, which drove two tanks into the
water to prop up the disintegrating bridge, then sent its Panzer
IVs racing across before the timbers finally collapsed.
On the far side the German vehicles made their way in single
file through the banks and ditches of a strong position—the
a-1 Stellung (see p. 377). There was nobody holding the line,
which was evidence of some kind of failure on the part of the
High Command, but a dense fog spared the column from fur-
ther attentions by the Soviet tanks and planes.
On 21 January Nehring's force came unawares very close to
the left flank of Chuikov's Eighth Guards Army, which was
driving through Lodz. Without knowing exactly why, Nehring
disregarded his staff officers, who advised him to take the good
road which led west through Lodz, and instead led his group
on a left-hand circuit through the woods and heaths to the
south. The Germans had to abandon and blow up vehicle after
RED STORM ON THE REICH
83
4. The Vistula-Oder Operation, 12 January-2 February 1945
T-
2nd
Belorussian
Front
1st
Belorussian
Front
•Tarnow
~38
~
4=======-::_---==-=-=
~
)()()()()(
14th
Ukrainian
Front
I
vehicle when they ran out of fuel, but units of the 16th Panzer
Division came across road signs which bore the insignia of
Grossdeutschland, and finally encountered an armoured re-
connaissance troop which told them that the corps was waiting
on the far side of the Warthe at Sieradz and that a small force
was in position on the right bank to receive them.
Still under the protection of the fog, Nehring's advance guard
reached the Warthe on the morning of 22 January, having cov-
ered 250 kilometres in eleven days, though the rest of the roving
cauldron was still so strung out that it took several days yet
for the last of the exhausted troops to complete the crossing.
All the tanks had been lost.
Nehring was told by von Saucken, the commander of Gross-
deutschland, that the rescuers were themselves cut off, for the
Russians had already seized a number of road junctions on the
direct way to the Oder. The joint force threaded its way for
one hundred kilometres to the river, and on the twenty-sev-
enth, on the final leg from Guhrau, Nehring's command came
across a stretch of road several kilometres in length where a
column of refugees had been shot up or crushed by the ram-
paging Russian tanks. The troops crossed the Oder at Glogau
in an appalled silence, but (so desperate was the situation of
the Reich) they were at once thrown into a counterattack against
a Russian bridgehead just to the south (see p. 96).
CHRISTOPHER DUFFY
86
CHAPTER 7
Konev's Exploitation
The Liberation of Czestochowa and Krakow
IT IS EVIDENT that the Russian armoured spearheads must have
driven very fast and far indeed after they had broken through
on the Vistula. As early as 16 January the Soviet armoured and
mechanised forces had reached objectives which had
originally been set for much later in the operation. STAVKA
therefore exploited the breakthrough by ordering Konev and
Zhukov to push on west and north-west in the direction of
Breslau and Posen. By pressing on without a halt, the armoured
and mechanised troops were to meet and overthrow any Ger-
man reserves and prevent the enemy from consolidating on
the river lines. Konev (who had less far to go) was going to be
the first to reach German territory and arrive at the natural
barrier of the Oder.
The rates of advance during the pursuit were the highest
achieved by the Soviets in the war so far. The rifle forces moved
at up to thirty kilometres every twenty-four hours, and the tank
and mechanised forces at between forty-five and seventy. The
Russians crossed the Nida, the Pilica and the Warthe in their
stride. At many places they seized the crossings intact, and at
others the bridges and ice passages were constructed by the
engineers, who arrived close behind the leading combat units.
On occasion, the engineers took a direct part in the fighting.
On the night of 16-17 January the Nehring battle group had
escaped from Kielce, which removed the last German area of
resistance in the neighbourhood of the old Sandomierz bridge-
87