The liquidation of the three huge groups of men trapped in the Minsk encirclement took eight days. Knowing that they must be either killed or captured, the Germans fought fanatically. In the next few days the losses on both sides were extremely high: only nine hundred of the 15,000 4th Army troops survived; only a fraction of the 100,000 trapped Germans ever made it back to their own lines. One Red Army soldier described tanks rolling over the bodies of the dead and wounded, making a ‘bloody paste’. A German infantryman remembered the suffering of the horses, how they were ‘ripped apart by shells, their eyes bulging out from empty red sockets … That is just almost worse than the torn-away faces of the men.’ On 3 July the 2nd Guards Tank Corps broke into the city. Zhukov, who knew Minsk well, wrote: ‘The capital of Byelorussia could hardly be recognized … Now everything was in ruins, with heaps of rubble in place of whole blocks of flats. The people of Minsk presented a pitiful sight, worn out and haggard, many of them crying.’ Special composite detachments were formed to comb the woods and hunt down the thousands of Germans who had wriggled free; by 11 July the rest were killed or captured. To Hitler’s fury, 57,000 German prisoners were taken, including twelve generals – three corps commanders and nine division commanders.36 Finally, he seemed to sense what was happening. On 4 July he gave a speech in the Platterhof which sounded almost defeatist: ‘If we lose the war, gentlemen, no readjustment will be necessary. It will only be necessary that everybody thinks about his own readjustment from this life into the next, whether he wants to do it himself, whether he wants to let himself be hanged, whether he wants to get a bullet through the base of the skull, whether he wants to starve or go to work in Siberia. Those are the only choices which the individual will then have to make.’37
The Germans’ panicked retreat did not stop their ruthless scorched-earth policy. Himmler ordered that everything left behind was to be razed: ‘Not a house is to remain standing, not a mine is to be available which is not destroyed and not a well which is not poisoned.’ Villages were hastily torched and animals slaughtered; nothing was to be left for the Red Army. German soldier Harry Mielert watched as ‘buildings and facilities were blown up by Pioneers. Everything roared, flamed, shook, cattle bellowed, soldiers searched through all the buildings.’38 Once again the civilians paid the heaviest price, either being killed outright or left with nothing. ‘Ruined villages, debris, and ashes marked our way. Behind us the last houses went up in flames, woods burned on the horizon, munitions dumps were blown up, and flares, shells and bombs went up like fireworks into the night sky.’39 The policy sometimes backfired: the stragglers needed water, but the wells had been damaged or poisoned; at one well a retreating soldier saw ‘a scummy mass with rotten wood and thorn-apple bushes afloat on it. Other wells had been blown up, and the last blocked off by mines. Tears of rage filled my eyes.’ But ‘we had been ordered to spread devastation so that our pursuers could find no shelter’.40 The Soviet condemnation of Model as a war criminal, which led directly to his suicide in 1945, included the ruthless scorched-earth policies he sanctioned during this retreat.
The Soviet offensive had been so successful that some in the West doubted the reports of Stalin’s triumph. Could it possibly be true that the Germans had suffered nearly half a million casualties, that 150,000 men, including twelve generals, had been captured, and that an astounding seventeen divisions of Army Group Centre had been wiped out in a mere two weeks? Stalin decided to prove to the world what he had done. In Operation ‘The Great Waltz’, named after a 1938 American film based on the life of Johann Strauss, he marched over 50,000 of the Germans captured at Minsk through Moscow. The vanquished had been loaded onto cattle trucks, and many had died from thirst or exhaustion on the way to the massive PoW camps that had been set up outside Moscow. Those who collapsed due to illness or wounds were shot. On 17 July the surviving prisoners were collected in the Central Moscow Hippodrome and the Dynamo Stadium. From there they were marched, led by their generals, through the streets of the city and into Red Square itself. It was a sobering sight. Muscovites watched quietly as the haggard men filed past, their fearful, downcast faces revealing the scale of their defeat. When a handful of young people jeered and threw stones at the prisoners, the Russian-born British war correspondent Alexander Werth noted that they were quickly restrained by their elders. The scene was too grave for that.
The Germans had been provided with a ration of greasy soup to give them energy, but their now starved digestive systems could not handle the fat, and many were stricken with acute diarrhoea. ‘Thousands of the “Vohna-Plennys”fn1 were unable to control their tortured bowels,’ and soiled themselves as they trudged through the streets. In an act heavy with symbolism, Stalin had street cleaners follow the columns to sweep up the ‘Nazi filth’.
As the German prisoners were being marched through Moscow, the Red Army was racing westward at a remarkable twenty-five kilometres a day. Stavka now realized that nothing stood between them and Poland and Lithuania. Despite technical problems, stretched supply lines and exhausted troops, Stalin decided to exploit this momentum, and ordered on 28 June that Kaunas, Grodno, Białystok and Brest-Litovsk be included in Bagration.
Stavka now issued order no. 220126, directing the 3rd Byelorussian Front to take Wilno, a move which would bring the Soviets deep into Polish Home Army (AK) territory. This presented particular problems for both forces. General Bór-Komorowski, Commander-in-Chief of the Home Army, had long planned for uprisings to break out all over Poland in order to aid the Red Army to rid the country of the Nazis. The Poles hoped that by aiding the liberation of their country they would boost their claims to create an independent state after the war, and prove to the world that they were a force to be reckoned with. On 26 June the commander of the Home Army District in Wilno, General Aleksander Krzyżanowski, code-named ‘Wilk’, set out the plans for an uprising for that city. Called Operation ‘Ostra Brama’ – ‘Gate of Dawn’ – it involved the Poles of the AK attacking the German forces just as they were evacuating their last positions.
Like the Western Allies, the Poles had been amazed at the speed and success of the Red Army’s advance, but they were well-organized and eager to fight to help liberate their country. The area around Wilno was ideal partisan territory. Vast forests and few roads had meant that they had been able to operate there even in the worst years of the occupation, with relatively little interference from the Germans; indeed, their main problems had come from rival Soviet-backed partisans, with whom they competed for matériel and influence. Over 12,000 Home Army men now gathered from Wilno and the surrounding area, but the roads were in chaos, as the city was being evacuated. The AK troops ran into retreating Germans and panicked civilians, or got caught up in local skirmishes; in the end, only about 5,000 of them actually made it to Wilno.
The German city commander, Luftwaffe Major-General Rainer Stahel, formerly city commander of Rome and a man Hitler trusted, had been ordered to hold Wilno with his 17,000 men. Stahel was not surprised when the Poles attacked on 7 July, just as the first Soviet tanks of the 3rd Byelorussian Front rolled into view. The AK were able to take part of the city centre, but were too weak to dislodge the Germans. As the Red Army began to close in, Model tried to persuade Hitler to change the designation of Wilno as a ‘fortress city’, but even after a series of long and violent arguments Hitler would not back down. Finally Model tricked him into thinking that the besieged troops had run out of drinking water – something Hitler himself had encountered in the First World War. He resentfully allowed a breakout, and Colonel General Reinhardt personally led the 3rd Panzer Army to create a passage through to the trapped garrison. But Stahel got only 3,000 of the 17,000 troops out; the rest were captured or killed, often in bitter hand-to-hand combat that lasted five days. The Germans surrendered on 13 July; the next day a jubilant Krzyżanowski reported to the government-in-exile in London: ‘Wilno captured with great participation of the AK, which is in the city. Great losses and destruction. Relations with the Soviet Army correct at the moment.’41 The Soviets flooded into Wilno on 15 July; Red Army and AK soldiers linked arms, sang and drank and celebrated in high spirits. The mood did not last. Within hours the NKVD had moved in. Stalin had no intention of allowing the Polish Home Army either political or military power, and had decided that it should be eliminated immediately.