Andy Ford continues his occasional series on the 80-year anniversaries of events in World War Two in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
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In January 1945 the Red Army chased the Nazis out of Poland, covering 300 miles in just 5 weeks, and ending over 5 years of brutal occupation.
The Russian armies had stopped just short of Warsaw [see previous article here] in August 1944 at the end of Operation Bagration [see article here] while they built up their supply lines, ammunition and fuel stores, and built new airfields for the VVS (Red Air Force).
By the beginning of 1945 they were ready for the next stage, the advance on the Nazi capital, Berlin. The Germans faced a Soviet force that was not just superior but simply overwhelming. When the chief of the army command, Heinz Guderian, who had made his name with the Panzers in the fall of France in 1940, was called to meet Hitler on Christmas Eve 1944, he carried with him intelligence estimates that the Red Army would attack around 12th January with an eleven to one superiority in infantry, seven to one in tanks and twenty to one in artillery. Hitler and Himmler refused to accept the estimates and Hitler angrily declared it was all made up, while Himmler told Guderian that the Russians would probably not attack at all and it was all an “enormous bluff”.
However, on January 12th, the Soviet armies did break out of their bridgeheads on the southern River Vistula and a huge artillery bombardment, with guns placed every 3 or 4 yards, shattered the German front line. The German commander drove off, abandoning his troops to their fate, allowing the 1st Ukrainian Front, under Marshal Konev, to push across southern Poland towards Silesia.
Two days later, on the 14 January, Marshal Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front moved out of their Vistula bridgeheads just south of Warsaw, quickly breaking through weakly defended German lines and then turning north towards the main Luftwaffe base, west of Warsaw at Sochaczew, where they captured dozens of German planes.
While the Germans were trying to deal with this breakthrough, on the 15 January, the 1st Polish Army of the Soviet allied ‘Polish People’s Army’ (Ludowe Wojsko Polskie/LWP) made further crossings of the Vistula north of Warsaw and was fighting in the suburbs of the Polish capital.
Polish flag over Warsaw
Warsaw was not strongly defended and the garrison had no chance of fighting off the Soviet encirclement, or even of holding out. Guderian authorised their withdrawal. When Hitler found out, at his midnight conference on the 16/17 January, he was furious, shouting at Guderian that Warsaw was a ‘fortress’ that “must be held”. Hitler had three of the officers concerned arrested by the Gestapo. But it was too late and soldiers of the LWP raised the Polish flag over the shattered city on the 17th.
[Photo – wiki commons]
What they found in Warsaw was shocking. The city consisted almost totally of bombed out and roofless buildings, with the exhausted and starved survivors camping out in the ruins or crammed into the few remaining buildings. Of 1.3 million residents only 160,000 remained after the Warsaw Rising of 1944 and the subsequent Nazi retribution.
Their troops and collaborators had massacred civilians at will, denied them medical treatment and food, and special ‘Burning and Destruction Detachments’ (Verbrennungs und Vernichtungs Kommando), had systematically blown up and demolished the landmarks of Polish culture like the university, the libraries, the Old Town and the Royal Castle.
One Soviet army captain wrote,
“We saw the destruction of Warsaw when we entered on that memorable day, 17th January 1945. Nothing was left but ash and ruins…Badly starved and exhausted residents were making their way home.”
[quoted from “Russia in the War” by Alexander Werth]
Sights like this prepared the way for the brutal revenge taken when the Red Army entered East Prussia and Germany itself.
[Photo – wiki commons]
Marshal Rokossovsky struck north after Warsaw was taken by the Red Army and cut through East Prussia, reaching the coast near Gdansk/Danzig on January 26th, cutting off the German armies, and civilians, in East Prussia.
Chaos in German retreat
In Poland itself, Zhukov reached the River Oder, 40 miles from Berlin, on 29th January. His forces were covering around 60 miles a day. Such was the chaos in the German retreat that no effective force stood between Zhukov and Berlin at that point. Despite this, Stalin told Zhukov to stop and not to advance on the Nazi capital, in a move that could have potentially ended the war 3 months earlier.
Stalin was not stupid, whatever else he was, and his instruction needs explanation. The official reason was that he was worried that the German forces in East Prussia could attack south and cut Zhukov off, which looks possible from the maps, but the German forces in East Prussia were merely holding on, trying to buy time for the civilian population to be evacuated by sea; they did not have the freedom to counter attack southwards.
Or did Stalin not want Zhukov to be the one to enter Berlin and end the monstrous Nazi empire? Zhukov was popular and well known in the army and in the country and certainly, after the war, was dealt with as a rival and a threat.
Zhukov obeyed his orders to stop at the Oder, rather than be arrested by the NKVD secret police, and began mopping up in West Prussia. The region, renamed as the ‘Warthegau’ (after the River Warthe) had been the scene of some of the Nazis greatest crimes in Poland involving the forcible expulsion of 700,000 Poles to make way for German settlers; mass abduction of children to be raised as ‘Germans’; and 160,000 Jews forced into the ghetto in Lodz and subsequently sent to their death concentration camps.
Meanwhile, in southern Poland, on the 27, Konev reached Silesia, which was abandoned by the Germans except for the ‘Fortress City’ of Wroclaw/Breslau. Although the city was to hold out even beyond the official end of the war, the loss of Silesia made the German war economy virtually inoperable and Hitler’s armaments supremo, Albert Speer, assessed the life of the ‘Thousand Year Reich’ as no more than a few weeks.
Hitler’s ‘Divine Protection’
After all these disasters Hitler had the gall to invoke divine protection in his address to the nation on the 30th; his last radio broadcast:
“By sparing my life on July 20, the Almighty has shown that He wishes me to continue as your Führer. German workers, work! German soldiers, fight! German women, be as fanatical as ever! No nation can do more.”
[quoted from “Berlin” by Anthony Beevor]
This, as thousands of refugees fled East Prussia as best they could in the freezing cold, and 150,000 civilians were trapped in besieged Konigsberg.
Meanwhile, in central Poland, the fortress of Poznan/Posen was marooned, as one of Hitler’s ‘fortress cities’. Poznan had been bypassed by Zhukov in his rush to the German frontier and was one of the strongest fortresses in Europe. It had a ring of nine strongly built forts, topped with concrete, and defended by machine gun positions, all supported by extensive food and ammunition stores.
Ironically the task of taking this unwelcome objective fell to General Chuikov, the victor of Stalingrad. It took four full divisions of the Red Army to surround and take the forts in headlong assaults with huge losses on both sides. Around 6,000 Red Army men lost their lives in the siege, and such was the chaos in the besieged garrison that the German dead were not even counted.
By mid-February, after fighting block by block through the city in a sort of reverse Stalingrad, the Germans held only the citadel, now full of German wounded – with almost no medical care available. After initial Soviet attacks were thwarted by the defenders, the Red Army succeeded in getting tanks into the citadel, at which point the fanatical Nazi commander, General Gonnell, shot himself, and his successor finally surrendered on 22nd February, stating,
“I am not a member of the Nazi Party and I would not have shed all this blood so needlessly. Hitler is finished”.
[quoted in “Fallen Eagle” by Robin Cross]
The fall of Poznan allowed the Russians a full supply line towards Berlin, necessary for the final assault. 90% of the historic city centre lay in ruins, and had to be reconstructed by the post-war government of Poland.
Nazi defeat – but no “liberation”
Although the Nazis had been defeated in Poland, it was in no sense a “liberation”. After the frontline had passed over the Polish towns and cities they were followed by the NKVD secret police and the SMERSH (’Death to Spies’) military counter-intelligence.
During the grim years of genocidal Nazi occupation, the Polish resistance had built a whole underground state, with secret church services, illegally printed newspapers, schools, even courts and concerts – and an armed wing. The ‘Armia Krajowa’ (AK) or ‘Home Army’ counted up to 500,000 fighters who sabotaged German supplies to the Eastern Front, defended Polish civilians against Ukrainian nationalist pogroms and, on occasion, freed prisoners from the Gestapo.
Stalin and Beria (NKVD Chief) could not tolerate the existence of the underground state, or the Home Army, partly because it was loyal to the Polish government in exile, but mainly because it represented the self-organisation of the Polish working class and rural population. Any independent movement of the working class could spread into the Red Army or the Soviet Union itself and threaten the rule of the bureaucracy.
The first step was to instruct the AK soldiers to give up their weapons and register with the occupying authorities in return for an amnesty. But those who registered quickly found themselves arrested and sent into the Gulag, from which many never returned. So began a vicious struggle, almost to the level of civil war, from 1944 to 1948. It was the basis of an acclaimed film by Andrzej Wajda, ‘Ashes and Diamonds’.
But the Polish working class never reconciled themselves to Stalinist rule and maintained their tradition of self-organisation and defiance, with major uprisings in 1956, 1970 and finally in 1989 with the Solidarity movement.
[Further reading: The history of Trotskyism in Poland can be found on the Marxist Internet Archive – here]
