Duffy Christopher. Red Storm On The Reich (ENG)

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came storming towards us with wild cries of Ura! but von

Tettau called out with quiet confidence to one of his staff

officers: 'Now then, gentlemen, let's give them something to

remember!' We all proceeded to shoot at the attacking troops

as calmly as if we had been on a rifle range. I picked up a

rifle from one of the casualties and joined in—this was the

first time in the war I had been so close to the enemy. The

Russians then opened fire with mortars, but the bombs

passed over us and landed on the beach. I looked in that

direction and my stomach churned. Behind and beneath us,

in the lee of the cliffs, the refugees were fleeing to the west,

and the Russian shells were bursting among them. (Paul,

1978, 160)

At one stage a Russian counterattack from the south threatened

to throw the whole mass of soldiers and civilians into the sea,

but the troops finally broke through to Dievenow and the ref-

ugees completed the final twenty kilometres of their via dolorosa

amid appalling scenes:

Never had I seen so many bodies—civilians, German and

Russian soldiers—but especially the Russians in great heaps,

lying this way and that on top of one another. Between the

corpses were strewn dead horses, the overturned carts of the

refugees, bogged-down military transport, burnt-out cars,

weapons and equipment. ... It was depressing enough to

see the soldiers, who had had nothing to eat for days and

were totally exhausted, but the faces of the women were

indescribable. I saw mothers cast their infants into the sea

because they could carry them no further. (Borgelt, in Paul,

1978, 160-61)

By the end of 11 March 6,000 soldiers and 26,000 refugees had

been ferried from Dievenow to the island of Wollin. The passage

of the rest was completed in the course of the twelfth.

CHRISTOPHER DUFFY

198

PART V

The Siege of the

Fortress Cities

THE IMPETUS which swept the Russian forces through northern

Europe in the New Year of 1945 died away in the course of

February. The ebbing tide revealed what an extraordinary col-

lection of human debris had been thrown up on the isolated

islands of German resistance—broken units of Wehrmacht and

Volksgrenadiers, 'stomach,' 'ear,' and 'eye' battalions, men of

the Luftwaffe without their aircraft, Fallschirmjäger without

their parachutes, grimly determined SS, silver-haired Volks-

sturm, Hitlerjugend burning with enthusiasm, Baltic and Rus-

sian volunteers, Hiwi auxiliaries and, above all, thousands

upon thousands of civilian refugees.

Large Russian forces were tied up with the task of eliminating

the German strong points and asylums up to and even beyond

the start of the Berlin Operation on 16 April. These episodes,

which have scarcely entered the general literature of the Second

World War, are the subject of the present part of this book. We

shall begin at the East Prussian 'balcony,' then follow the Baltic

coast by Danzig and Kolberg to the mouth of the Oder, and

trace the course of the river and its hinterland as far upstream

as Breslau, where the Germans held out almost until the end

of the war.

201

CHAPTER 17

East Prussia

The Strategic Background

ON 9 FEBRUARY General I. Kh. Bagramyan was summoned to

the headquarters of the 3rd Belorussian Front, where General

Chernyakovskii explained the state of affairs to him, 'smoothing

his thick, dark hair' and speaking 'in a pleasant, sonorous bar-

itone' (Bagramyan, in Erickson, ed., 1987, 221). The trouble

was that the German forces in East Prussia, although they were

fragmented in three parts, were still powerful and under ef-

fective control. Just how much fight the Germans had in them

became evident in a few days' time.

On 20 February German troops, attacking simultaneously

from Königsberg and Samland, drove through the Russian

Thirty-Ninth Army and broke the first blockade of the city (see

p. 166). Chernyakovskii himself had been killed on the eigh-

teenth in central East Prussia, and the loss of this popular and

respected commander would in any case have forced the Rus-

sians to review their priorities.

Marshal A. M. Vasilevskii took command of the orphaned

3rd Belorussian Front on 21 February, and on the following day

he extended his area of responsibility north to take in the 1st

Baltic Front, which was integrated in the main army group

under the name of the Samland Front. Vasilevskii was now able

to plan on the grand scale, and he decided to destroy the Ger-

man Army Group North 'one chunk at a time,' concentrating

his forces in turn against

203

• the Heiligenbeil Cauldron

• the fortress-city of Königsberg

• the Samland peninsula.

The Heiligenbeil Cauldron and the Destruction of

the Fourth Army, 13-28 March 1945

The 'Heiligenbeil Cauldron' was the name given to the area

defended by the German Fourth Army. After Hossbach had

failed in his attempt to break out to the west at the end of

January (see p. 173), this formation was isolated in the coastal

region of central East Prussia, except for a narrow corridor

extending to Königsberg. The army consisted of fifteen assorted

divisions, of which the most effective were probably the 24th

Panzer Division, the Hermann-Göring Parachute Division, and

the detached Panzer-Grenadier Division of the Grossdeutsch-

land Panzer Corps. The bridgehead was called after the town

of Heiligenbeil, but until the middle of March the Germans

held an area of ground which extended fifty kilometres as the

crow flies along the shore from the neighbourhood of Frauen-

burg in the south-west to the approaches to Königsberg in the

north-east. Inland the depth reached between ten and twenty

kilometres.

Behind the bridgehead lay the Frisches Haff, where the ice

remained firm enough to permit civilian refugees to escape to

the Nehrung sandspit until the end of February. Travelling in

the opposite direction, salvoes of 280-mm shells from the heavy

cruisers Lützow and Admiral Scheer passed clear over the sand-

spit and the Haff and thundered into the Russian forces attack-

ing the Frauenburg flank of the cauldron. Wormditt on the

landward perimeter was abandoned on 11 February, and the

planes on its airfield were blown up, but as a general rule when

the Germans gave ground, it was dictated by the lack of fuel

and ammunition rather than by pressure on the part of the

Russians.

CHRISTOPHER DUFFY

204

The Germans' term of grace expired on 13 March, by when

Vasilevskii had built up a full seven armies against the cauldron.

Some of the victims believed that the bombardment from ar-

tillery and the air was unprecedented:

Beneath this fire the German soldiers lay in their little

foxholes—hungry, exhausted, hollow-cheeked and wearing

sodden uniforms. The Russian armoured wedges drove for-

ward, with the troops coming up behind roaring their Urasì

But not all life was extinct. Covered with earth, the hardened

Landser emerged from their holes. They threw their machine

guns over the parapets of the trenches, shot into the grey-

brown masses with their assault rifles and machine pistols,

and dashed forward with their Panzerfausts against the en-

emy tanks. (Dieckert and Grossmann, 1960, 143)

It soon became clear that the Russians were concentrating along

two axes—against the coastal corridor to Königsberg, and

against the sector of the southern perimeter in front of Heili-

genbeil. The Russians severed the communication with Kö-

nigsberg on the first day, and when fine weather arrived on 18

March they were able to bring all their air forces into play.

On 21 March the obedient General Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller,

as commander of the Fourth Army, sent an officer by air to

Hitler to beg permission for the troops and heavy equipment

to be evacuated from the port of Rosenberg while that operation

was still a physical possibility. Hitler refused, even though Hei-

ligenbeil, scarcely five kilometres inland, was already in the

front lines. On the next day Russian aircraft deluged the Ger-

man positions in Heiligenbeil with phosphorous bombs: 'The

whole town was a sea of flames. The troops got through only

with singed uniforms, and rubber capes which had shrivelled

in the heat' (Dieckert and Grossmann, 1960, 147).

The Germans were cleared from the railway station of Hei-

ligenbeil on the twenty-fourth, which deprived them of their

last strongpoint in the town, and over the next three days the

RED STORM ON THE REICH

205

Fourth Army disintegrated against the shores of the Frisches

Haff. Three divisions were cut off at Leysuhnen and lost, while

the rest of the forces crouched among the hundreds of vehicles

at Rosenberg under heavy artillery and air attack, or, like the

remnants of the 24th Panzer Division, hastened north along

the Haff road to a final defensive line which was forming across

the little Balga peninsula. A merciful fog grounded the Russian

aircraft on 28 March and saved the Germans from final anni-

hilation. On that day the last troops were embarked at Rosen-

berg, while the final craft to leave Balga evacuated 2,530

combatants, 2,830 wounded and 3,300 civilian refugees. On the

landward side of Balga a small rearguard from the 562nd Di-

vision stood and fought under Colonel Hufenbach, who was

ultimately killed along with his men.

According to Russian accounts, 93,000 German troops lost

their lives in the battle for the Heiligenbeil Cauldron between

13 and 28 March. A further 46,448 men fell into Russian hands,

along with 605 tanks and assault guns, 3,559 field guns, 1,441

mortars and 128 aircraft.

The Lull at Königsberg,

21 February to 1 April 1945

Even before Marshal Vasilevskii had finished off the Fourth

Army, he was redeploying to attack the fortress-city of Kö-

nigsberg. The wonder was that it had not fallen long since. In

late January and early February it had been a kind of Rosenberg

writ large, serving as a refuge for broken troops of another of

those doomed German armies, in this case the Third Panzer.

For two days the Russians had it in their power to take Kö-

nigsberg by a coup de main, but with the help of reinforcements

the perimeter of the city was stabilised along the line of the

ring road and the outer forts, and on 19 and 20 February the

garrison of Königsberg attacked in concert with the German

CHRISTOPHER DUFFY

206

forces from Samland, and reopened the land corridor with the

west (for these events, see pp. 157-166). When a corps of the

Russian Forty-Third Army tried to break the connection, it

found itself facing 'a wall of steel' (Bagramyan, in Erickson,

ed„ 1987, 226).

The German gamble paid off handsomely. Not only did it

save Königsberg, but it forced the Russians to recast their whole

scheme for the conquest of East Prussia, reducing it bit by bit

instead of all in one rush (see p. 203).

Inside Königsberg the commandant, General Otto Lasch, did

what he could to turn the reprieve to advantage. He established

the main line of defence (HKL) along the perimeter of twelve

outer forts which had been built between 1874 and 1882. Fox-

holes were dug into the earth covering of these massive ma-

sonry structures, and wire and minefields were set out

cunningly on the approaches, but the Germans did not have

the artillery to strike at long range at the insolent Russians,

who could be seen at their ease in their trenches, or driving in

convoys at night with their headlights full on. The Germans

prepared interior defences along the girdle of inner forts

(1843-73), on the continuous ramparts of the city proper and

finally in 'an old royal castle perched on the high bank of the

Pregel River . . . serving as a hiding place for thousands of

fanatical fascists' (Bagramyan, in Erickson, ed., 1987, 229).

The size of the garrison during the lull and the second siege

stood at between 35,000 (Lasch) and 135,000 (the Russian ac-

counts). The difference probably comes from the difficulty of

defining which personnel were of combatant status. In terms

of formations, the garrison consisted of four burnt-out divi-

sions, including one of Volksgrenadiers, together with a further

Volksgrenadier division (the 561st) which stood at the entrance

to the Samland corridor.

During the first siege Lasch had put a great deal of effort into

restoring the 5th Panzer Division and the 1st Infantry Division,

and he was aggrieved that after the breakthrough on 20 Feb-

ruary he had been compelled to yield up these two valuable

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207