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

in utter secrecy. This monumental task was undertaken with deadly seriousness. No information was to be permitted to leak to the Germans. Correspondence, telephone conversations and telegraph messages were strictly forbidden. Front-line soldiers were not to know that they were going on the attack, but were told that they were holding ‘defensive positions’; General Sergei Shtemenko ordered that ‘front, army, and divisional newspapers published material only on defence matters. All talks to the troops were about maintaining a firm hold on present positions.’¹⁹ The troops were carried in by train, but were often dropped a hundred kilometres to the east of their assembly points; in many places the move to the front line was ordered only two days before the attack began. There were to be no unauthorized people in the area, and the transport of troops and equipment was kept from the sight of the general public as much as possible: 50,000 supply vehicles moved at night in strict blackout conditions, and the construction of roads and pontoon bridges was done only after dark and under cover. Vehicles could not use headlights, but instead followed daubs of fluorescent paint on the tailgates of those in front; white posts were put by the sides of roads as night markers. No artillery fire was permitted. Tank crews being moved to the front were forbidden to wear their black uniforms lest they be spotted by German spies; officers had to dress as private soldiers, and even bathing in the open was forbidden. The enemy, as Rokossovsky put it, was permitted to see ‘only what we wanted him to see’.²⁰

      All the while, the fronts were being secretly supplied under the noses of the Germans with immense quantities of matériel and equipment: nearly 400,000 tonnes of ammunition, 300,000 tonnes of fuel and lubricants, and 500,000 tonnes of foodstuffs and fodder were moved in. Five combined armies, two armoured armies, one air army and the 1st Polish Army were brought, up as were five independent armour, two mechanized and four cavalry corps out of the Supreme Command reserve, as well as dozens of independent regiments and brigades of all fighting arms. Eleven air corps were moved to new bases, and tanks equipped with heavy rollers were brought in to break through the minefields. As Zhukov put it, ‘All these movements had to be done with great caution to prevent the enemy’s detection of the preparations for the offensive. This was especially important since our intelligence reports showed that the German High Command expected us to make the first blow of the summer campaign in the Ukraine, not Byelorussia.’²¹

      While the real offensive was being prepared in top-secret conditions, the Soviets worked equally hard to convince Hitler that the main summer offensive would be staged against Model’s Army Group North Ukraine. As Byelorussia went ‘quiet’, the Ukrainian theatre was abuzz with manufactured noise and movement. Soviet air activity increased dramatically. German reconnaissance flights were allowed to pass over the lines and photograph the ‘armies’ that were gathering – armies which actually consisted of rubber tanks and mock gun emplacements. In a strange take on the Potemkin Village, only 10 per cent of the arms in the entire region were genuine. Heavy radio traffic was faked, and increased rail usage simulated. Small teams of men were sent out into the forests at night; when German planes flew over they shone torches into the sky, before moving forward ten kilometres and repeating the performance, to convince the Germans that the forests were crawling with troops. Major V. Vilensky was not the only one ordered to move his division back and forth to make it look as if ten divisions had been brought up. ‘We’d move out at night, come back in the morning, sleep the whole day, and then repeat it all over again.’²²

      Hitler was completely taken in by the deception, but so too were General Kurt Zeitzler, chief of staff at OKH (the German Supreme Command), and Generaloberst Jodl, chief of staff of OKW. General Reinhard Gehlen, chief of the intelligence branch of OKH dealing with the Eastern Front – Fremde Heere Ost (FHO) – was so convinced by the troop movements in the south that he told Hitler the area north of the Pripyat marshes would be left out of any Soviet offensive altogether. Hitler mused that the Soviets might even ‘refuse to fight’ once they reached their own pre-war border. ‘Soviet enthusiasm for a military advance is still out of the question,’ claimed a German report. It was wishful thinking, but the Führer was insistent: Stalin would attack in the south, and he would hear no arguments to the contrary. Hitler believed he had the chance to achieve a major victory in Ukraine, and save the situation on the Ostfront.

      Utterly convinced he was right, Hitler set about weakening Army Group Centre still further. Twenty-four of its thirty Panzer and mechanized divisions – 88 per cent of its tanks in all – were ordered to move south of the Pripyat marshes, along with half its tank destroyers. This left a mere 118 battle tanks and 377 assault guns against the cunningly hidden 2,715 Soviet tanks and 1,355 assault guns. There were, in fact, no actual tanks remaining in the so-called 3rd Panzer Army. German artillery was just as depleted, with 2,589 barrels against a staggering 24,383. The discrepancy in the air was also profound – the Luftwaffe had only 602 operational aircraft to the Soviets’ 4,000, and the lack of high-octane fuel meant that many could not even take off. Hitler also slashed Army Group Centre to a mere 400,000 men, from its peak of one million. The Red Army had 1.25 million soldiers for the first phase alone – already a three to one ratio – but 2.5 million more were waiting just behind the front line. The Germans didn’t stand a chance.²³

      Field Marshal Ernst Busch, commander of Army Group Centre, was one of Hitler’s most sycophantic and obsequious generals. After meetings with the Führer, who by now was issuing ever more incoherent and impossible orders, the compliant Busch would tell his senior general staff officer Colonel Peter von der Groeben: ‘I am a soldier. I have learnt to obey.’ This blind obedience did Busch’s career a lot of good, but it was a disaster for the men about to face the full might of the Red Army.

      Despite Stalin’s best efforts, information was starting to leak that the Soviets were up to something in Byelorussia. There had been slip-ups, as when General P.A. Rotmistrov, commander of the 5th Guards Tank Army, was reported by a Russian prisoner of war to have been spotted in the Smolensk area.²⁴ The Germans began to detect Soviet tanks and troops. General Jordan, commander of 9th Army, tried to convince Field Marshal Busch to persuade Hitler that something terrible was about to happen. The 9th Army Intelligence Summary of 19 June stated categorically that ‘the enemy attacks to be expected on Army Group Centre’s sector – on Bobruisk, Mogilev, Orsha and possibly south-west of Vitebsk – will be of more than local character. All in all the scale of ground and air forces suggests that the aim is to bring about the collapse of Army Group Centre’s salient by penetrations of several sectors.’ The report was ignored.

      The staff of 9th Army were furious, but Busch remained steadfastly loyal to Hitler, flying to Führer headquarters only on 22 June, when the Soviet operation was just hours away. When Busch finally told Hitler that an attack of some kind was expected the Führer flew into an uncontrollable rage. The Soviets could not have deceived them; the Red Army was too weak to attack in both places; how dare he introduce such nonsense to a serious discussion? Busch was shocked by the dressing down, and scuttled back to Minsk, calling a hasty conference and telling his horrified generals that the Führer had ordered them to hold their positions at any cost. Worse still, they were to halt all construction on rear lines of defence. The German troops would have nowhere to go when the tidal wave came.

      In a strange twist of fate, Hitler seemed bent on repeating Stalin’s grave mistakes of 1941, refusing to listen either to those generals who were now trying to warn him of an imminent attack, or to the latest intelligence reports. As a result, Bagration was to become almost a mirror image of Barbarossa, with hundreds of thousands of German troops waiting like sitting ducks to be encircled, killed or imprisoned. One of Hitler’s most ludicrous inventions, announced in Führer Order no. 11 of 8 March 1944, was the creation of ‘Feste Plätze’, or fortress cities. The idea stemmed from Hitler’s First World War experience, and his determination that not a single piece of ground was to be given over to the enemy. It ran contrary to his earlier strategy – he had never wanted his troops to become bogged down in street fighting in Leningrad or Moscow, for example. Now, however, cities were to be designated as ‘fortresses’, and to hold out like medieval castles even when completely surrounded. Those trapped within them were to fight on until help came; if it did not, they were to die in a heroic orgy of blood, defending every last inch of ground in the name of the Fatherland. The latter scenario was the most probable, as by now there was little hope of holding