Warsaw 1944: Hitler, Himmler and the Crushing of a City. Alexandra Richie

       At the Berezina

      The scenes of slaughter of the 4th Army along the Berezina River rivalled the fate of the Grande Armée in 1812. One German soldier recalled how, in 1941, an entrenchment party had found a Napoleonic eagle in the earth by the river, dropped no doubt as the Grande Armée had fled. ‘The parallels with the Napoleonic retreat were now borne in upon us in a shattering way,’ he said of the crumbling front. The Soviets squeezed the Germans up against the river and mowed them down. The living did anything they could to try to get across: some floated on pieces of wood, some who couldn’t swim clutched onto those who could, until it looked as if ‘bunches of grapes were sinking in the water’. At one section the Germans tried to force their way out to get to the river no fewer than fifteen times. General P.A. Tieremov, commander of the Russian 108th Infantry Division, recalled an attempted German breakout past the 444 and 407 Regiments. ‘Despite the concentration of artillery no fewer than 2,000 enemy soldiers and officers walked into our positions. Artillery opened fire at seven hundred metres, machine guns at four hundred metres. The Nazis kept walking. Artillery shells were exploding in the middle of their formations. Machine guns felled entire rows of people. The Nazis walked on, stepping over the bodies of their soldiers. They walked to break through, and did not take anything else into account. It was a crazy attack. We saw a horrific picture from our observation posts.’ General Gorbatov decided to use the events at Bobruisk to educate his troops. ‘I crossed the railway bridge on the Berezina River adopted by the enemy for vehicle movement and I was shocked at what I saw. The entire field next to the bridge was covered with the bodies of the Nazis. There were no less than 3,000 … I changed the route of two divisions of the second line of attack so that they would walk past that railway bridge and see the work done by the comrades of the first line of attack. It gave them an extra six kilometres but they would be rewarded in the future because they had seen what could be done.’

      The Germans held only one crossing on the Mogilev–Minsk highway, and utter pandemonium reigned as every kind of vehicle tried to crowd onto the bridge. ‘There were fights and swearing; the military police were powerless,’ recalled one soldier. Sturmovik ground-attack aircraft strafed the fleeing troops, killing them in droves. For those fortunate enough to get across alive, the other side of the river was equally chaotic. Infantrymen and officers of all ranks headed towards Minsk as fast as they could; many wore only their underwear, having stripped down for their swim across the river, and most were without boots, weapons or equipment. These so-called Rückkämpfer, alone or in small groups, were harassed by the hated partisans. One remembered finding a field station in which there were around three hundred untransportable men. Nobody, not even the doctors, knew where the front was any more. ‘Partisans fell on the first-aid station. My courier and I ran several metres to the side and hid in the forest … later we moved back to the aid station. It was a horrible sight. As far as we could establish, everyone was shot or slain … we established that 400–500 lay dead strewn in the forest that day. Some of the wounded had been hit from behind with a shovel as they fled. This dreadful sight gave me the courage, in spite of my wounds, not to give up. I swore never to fall into the hands of “Ivan”.’³¹ Others were harassed from the air. The Russians strafed them and dropped phosphorus, giving the evening sky an eerie glow. The morale of the Germans was at rock bottom as they struggled across the boggy Byelorussian terrain. ‘We got to a bridge. Ready to blow. With savage shouts, we succeeded in driving the horses across the river … a mine laid by our sappers blew up drovers, horses, and the first of the guns. We didn’t care. We understood that no one was expecting us to get through.’³² By now, thirteen German divisions had been destroyed. That day, Rokossovsky was promoted to Marshal.

      The escaping Germans found no comfort in ‘Fortress Minsk’. The city, where von dem Bach and Himmler had met so confidently in 1941, and which had been slated by Hitler for destruction and replacement by a new metropolis to be named ‘Asgard’, was now in utter confusion. The streets leading west were clogged with soldiers and equipment, and ragged columns of evacuating civilians: ‘Old and young women, children, pregnant women, single men, barefoot in ripped shoes with sacking wrapped around their feet. An endless column stretched backward and forwards, making all the time for the west. In some places the forest was already burning, a last barrier against the advancing Russians.’³³ Von dem Bach had made sure to invent some ailment or other so that he could fly out of Minsk to the safety of Poznań in good time. Oskar Dirlewanger and his men were almost annihilated, but managed to fight their way out of Minsk, and raced down the Lida and Grodno road towards Poland, their two-year murder streak finally at an end. Bronisław Kaminski and his 6,000-strong brigade, fresh from recent massacres at Borisov, fought their way out too, and also made a dash for the Polish border. All of them would soon surface in Warsaw.

      Two days before the start of Bagration, Albert Speer had ordered that 40–50,000 boys aged between ten and fourteen who had been caught in von dem Bach’s ‘Kormoran’ sweep be transported to the Reich. ‘This action is aimed not only at preventing a direct reinforcement of the enemy’s military strength,’ he wrote, ‘but also at a reduction of his biological potentialities as viewed from the perspective of the future. These ideas have been voiced not only by the Reichsführer SS but also by the Führer.’³⁴ The Red Army had advanced so quickly that the Germans had not had time to carry out Speer’s order. Later, when the Soviets reached Minsk, they found several trainloads of these starving children crammed into railway carriages, still awaiting deportation to the Reich.

      When Model arrived in Minsk to take command of Army Group Centre he found the city in an uproar. The Soviets were less than twenty kilometres from his headquarters, and there were no reserves to attack their bridgeheads. The Russians were racing to close the pincers around Minsk, just as the Germans had done, in reverse, in 1941. It finally began to dawn on Hitler that Stalin intended nothing less than the complete encirclement and annihilation of Army Group Centre. He still ranted that his generals had to hold out at any cost, but after a week of massive losses, he at last allowed German Panzer divisions to be diverted from Ukraine. The 5th Panzer Division, reinforced with a battalion of Tiger tanks, now went up against General Pawel Rotmistrov’s 5th Guards Tank Army, hindering the Soviet advance. The tank battles raged for two days outside Minsk, and the Red Army suffered enormous losses, leading to Rotmistrov’s dismissal; but the German losses – their forces were reduced from 159 to just eighteen tanks – were more serious, as they had nothing to replace them with. The Tigers and Panzers had bought Army Group Centre some time, but they could not stem the Soviet tide, and the fate of Minsk was sealed.

      On 1 July the Nazis hurriedly blew up important buildings and key installations in the city. Fifteen thousand unarmed Rückkämpfer, 8,000 wounded and 12,000 rear-echelon staff from Army Group Centre headquarters were still trying to get out, and the 5th Panzer Army did all it could to hold the Soviets off a little longer. The gleaming white SS headquarters that Himmler had so proudly visited in 1941 were now empty – nobody bothered to burn papers any more, and files were tossed off the backs of trucks to allow room for a few more people. Only on the evening of 2 July did Hitler give permission for Minsk to be evacuated, but it was far too late. There were scenes of panic at stations as senior officers exploited their rank to get on the trains, ‘claiming precedence for themselves’.³⁵ At dawn on 3 July, the 1st and 3rd Byelorussian Fronts encircled the remnants of two German armies, while the 2nd Byelorussian Front attacked retreating Germans from the east. Model had inherited a desperate situation, and even he could not save the troops of the 4th Army and the remnants of the 9th Army. ‘Hitler and Stalin were very alike in some dreadful respects, but there is one fundamental point on which they differed absolutely,’ Albert Speer would later say. ‘Stalin had faith in his generals and, although meticulously informed of all major plans and moves, left them comparative freedom. Our generals, on the contrary, were robbed of all independence, all elasticity of action, even before Stalingrad. All decisions were taken by Hitler and once made were as if poured in cement, whatever changing circumstances demanded. This, more than anything else, lost Germany the war.’

      Hitler insisted that Model force a reversal with a series of ‘rapid hard counter-strikes’. But with what? The 9th Army was smashed to bits, the 4th Army had been surrounded, and the 3rd Panzer