Duffy Christopher. Red Storm On The Reich (ENG)

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The Germans had already begun to scuttle ships and blow up

the harbour installations, and during the night of 26-27 March

the last defenders and a few of the surviving civilians streamed

northwards along to coast to a refuge on the Oxhöft peninsula.

The End at Danzig, 23-28 March 1945

The last act at Danzig was played out under a pall of sulphur-

yellow smoke. Without authority from Forster or von Saucken

the Feldgendarmerie and the SS Sonderkommandos roamed the

streets, meting out summary justice to all those they considered

to have failed in their duty. The victims ranged from shell-

shocked Landser to terrified boys of the air-defence service, and

whole rows of trees along the Hindenburgallee bore suspended

forms. The placards slung around their necks announced the

crime: 'I was too cowardly to fight,' 'I hang here because I

abandoned my unit without permission' and so on.

The spirit of the front-line troops broke on 27 March, and the

process was hastened when the men learned that the com-

mander of the 4th Panzer Division, Lieutenant-General Cle-

mens Betzel, had been killed by a shell. The division fell back

on Langfuhr, and the dispatch rider Robert Poensgen was sent

to inform the rearward elements about the move. At a cross-

roads in Danzig he found that he was in the middle of a strike

by Katyushas and tubed artillery:

With all my strength I pressed on the brakes, I threw my

motor cycle around on the street, and before it had come to

a stop, I was crouching in the corner of a wall. Around me

all hell broke loose. This whole area of the town was being

thrashed by round after round of heavy and superheavy cal-

ibre. Houses broke apart like bundles of kindling, roof tim-

bers were hurled high into the air and masonry crashed into

the street. In an instant everything was shrouded in a red-

brick dust. Yellow and red flames flashed and flared repeat-

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edly through the veil, and the explosion of a round projected

a column of fire up through the dust. (Schäufler, 1973, 231)

Worse, much worse, awaited Poensgen on the far side of the

Vistula arm at Heubude:

For kilometres on end the road was totally jammed with

vehicles drawn up three or four abreast—petrol tankers, am-

munition trucks, teams of horses, ambulances. It was im-

possible to move forwards or back. Russian combat aircraft

now arrived in wave after wave, and threw bombs into that

unprotected, inextricable mass. This is what hell must be like.

Ammunition exploded, and burning petrol sprayed over

dead, wounded and living, over men and horses. It looked

like a heap of scrap metal in an annealing chamber of huge

dimensions. It was the worst thing I have ever seen in all

my years of active service—and I tell you I had already seen

a lot. (Schäufler, 1973, 234)

Now that his front was caving in, von Saucken ordered the

evacuation of Danzig to be completed on the night of 27-28

March. At midnight the staff of the 4th Panzer Division made

for the arm of the Vistula delta which extended behind Danzig.

Betzel's coffin was covered with the Reichskriegsßagge and was

fastened to his old command tank. His Kubelwagen car fol-

lowed behind, and the cortège made its way through the ruined

moonlit streets. The column came to a temporary halt in the

Hundgasse,

and in front of us . . . we could see the dispatch riders of

the various units. Girls from Zoppot and Danzig were sitting

in some of the sidecars. They had been with the troops for

some days now, and nobody objected to that. We noted the

dearly beloved of the dispatch rider from the Pioneers—she

was a pretty railway conductress, and he was determined to

marry her at the first opportunity.

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There was something sinister about the way the narrow

gables of the old houses soared into the sky. They were thin,

and they seemed to sway in the wind. The thought was still

in my mind when someone yelled a warning from in front:

'Watch out! The wall's coming down!' I saw the motor cycles

buzz into confused movement in a fraction of a second, and

then the wall broke into several pieces in the air and crashed

on the crowd. There was a roar, a crack, a violent gust of

air—and then an impenetrable cloud of dust. I stood as if

paralysed on the running board.

We all hastened to the scene of the catastrophe, where the

debris lay nearly one metre deep over the motor cycles. All

the soldiers were safe—for years now their reactions had

been honed to lightning speed, and they had been able to

leap to one side. But the girls had not moved from the sidecars

and they were all buried. Cold sweat ran down our backs as

we began to dig like madmen. The little Pioneer dispatch

rider seemed to be out of his mind. We helped him to lift his

dead bride from the sidecar. With extreme care he proceeded

to wash her face, which was covered with a thick layer of

dust. (Schäufler, 1973, 241-42)

The procession moved on and passed the Vistula bridge. Day-

light showed the abandoned city of Danzig burning along the

south-western horizon, and the wrecked vehicles of the Second

Army which littered the woods along the bank of the river.

The Last Bridgeheads

By the end of March the German forces on the Bight of Danzig

were holding three isolated pockets:

• The sandy Hela peninsula reached down from the north-

west, offering a refuge which was secure against all but air

attack until the end of the war, and the naval and fishing

CHRISTOPHER DUFFY

230

ports near the tip at Hela town received or transhipped

hundreds of thousands of refugees during the weeks of

spring (see p. 290).

• On the mainland eight thousand soldiers and many more

civilians from Gotenhafen had assembled on the coastal pla-

teau of the Oxhöfter Kämpe. Hitler now ordered the open

Oxhöft headland to be defended as one of his 'fortresses,'

which was patently absurd, and the Kriegsmarine and von

Saucken colluded to ship all the troops and refugees to Hela.

The Germans completed the work when the last craft left at

1600 on 5 April. Five hours later Hitler gave his consent for

von Saucken to abandon the peninsula.

• The Danziger Werder, the marshy meadows of the Vistula

delta, received the German troops and civilians who had

escaped from Danzig. The long eastward extension, the Neh-

rung sandspit, offered salvation for those coming from Sam-

land. The German pioneers had blown up the Vistula dykes

on 27 March, releasing a flood of water which made the delta

inaccessible to the Russian land forces. There was, however,

no protection against the Soviet air strikes, and the German

troops and civilians were pounded into such a state of in-

sensibility that many of them had to be hauled from their

foxholes when vessels arrived to take them off. All the ci-

vilians were evacuated by the beginning of May, and von

Saucken decided that the troops must follow. The shipments

were still taking place when, on 9 May, the High Command

ordered that the whole remaining force must surrender to

the Russians.

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CHAPTER 19

Kolberg

KOLBERG was a small port which stood at the mouth of the

Persante River in the centre of an otherwise empty stretch of

the sandy East Pomeranian coast. It was famous in Prussian

history for having undergone five sieges, most notably by the

French in 1807 (see p. 287). In 1872, however, it was stripped

of its military role. The fortifications were demolished in the

course of the next year, and Kolberg survived undisturbed until

it was again declared a 'fortress' in November 1944.

Little had been done to put Kolberg in a state of defence

before Colonel Fritz Fullriede, an old colonial hand from South-

west Africa, arrived on 1 March 1945 to inspect the progress

of the work. He found that the railway station was jammed

with refugees and trains waiting to leave for the West, and that

a further twenty trains were stranded outside. Fullriede did

what he could to relieve the congestion while the line to the

Oder was still open, but the local kreisleiter refused to coop-

erate, saying that he had received no such authority from the

Pomeranian Gauleiter Franz Schwede-Coburg (who was a no-

toriously brutal individual).

By now Russian commanders had unspread their maps of

Pomerania and were jabbing with stubby fingers at Kolberg,

for this little town was the terminal point of the formation

boundary between the 1st and 2nd Belorussian fronts in the

opening phase of their East Pomeranian Operation. On 4 March

the leading units of the First Guards Tank Army reached the

coast on either side of Kolberg, making it physically impossible

for any more refugees to escape from the town by land. The

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Russian army then turned east for some more urgent business

in the direction of Gotenhafen (see p. 194), and its place before

Kolberg was taken by an initial two divisions of the First Polish

Army, which had a Soviet regiment of self-propelled artillery

under its command.

Inside Kolberg the Germans had a feeble and motley force

comprising broken units of the Wehrmacht, two poorly

equipped Volkssturm battalions, and stranded personnel of the

Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine. The total military personnel

amounted to about 3,300, of whom around 2,200 were com-

batants. In fact, OKH regarded it as a near-miracle that someone

was defending Kolberg at all, for the von Tettau corps group

(see p. 197), which should have been defending this area, had

been cut off to the west of the First Guards Tank Army's break-

through. Fullriede himself had come merely to make an in-

spection, as we have seen, and it was only the force of

circumstances which installed him as commandant. The gar-

rison and town were swamped by 68,000 civilians, most of

whom were refugees from the hinterland.

It was clear that Kolberg had to be defended at all costs. Most

immediately, Colonel Fullriede had to provide a shield behind

which the civilians could be evacuated by the Kriegsmarine. In

a wider context he was supposed to draw the enemy away from

the northern flank of the von Tettau group, as Guderian em-

phasised in a telephone conversation with the headquarters of

Army Group Vistula on 3 March.

From 13 March the combined Polish and Russian forces began

to attack in a more systematic way, and some particularly threat-

ening thrusts developed in the direction of the harbour from

both sides of the Persante. After a desperate scramble of a fight

on the morning of 14 March, the Poles used the open radio at

1530 to demand the surrender of Kolberg. Fullriede had just

managed to stabilise his front, and he was content to reply:

'The commandant has taken due notice.' A second summons

at 1600 went unanswered.

The Germans had contrived to hold on thus far with the help

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of two destroyers (Z 34 and Z 43) which stood off shore firing

their 150-mm guns. Within the perimeter the Germans had only

four tanks (Mark IVs), and even these eventually broke down

and had to be hauled around by trucks. It was impossible to

dig trenches, because the water table was so high, and the

Germans were forced to hold out in shallow scrapes in the

ground and in the collapsing houses.

Towards the end of the siege the losses through enemy action

amounted to 40 per cent of the defenders as a whole, and 60

per cent of the Volkssturm, and yet the perimeter had con-

tracted so much that there was scarcely room for the survivors

to fight. Two companies of the 5th Fortress Regiment (Fes-

tungsregiment 5) were landed on 15 March, contrary to Full-

riede's wishes, and these low-grade newcomers proved to be

useless in the intense fighting in the burning town.

This dearly bought time allowed the Kriegsmarine to thin out

the waiting masses of the civilians, who were suffering terribly

from artillery fire and the effects of the foul water. Nearly all

the babies fell ill and died, and whole families committed su-

icide so as to put an end to their collective misery.

From 11 March the two destroyers and the torpedo boat

T 33 operated a shuttle service from Swinemünde, arriving off

Kolberg to bombard the enemy, taking on board refugees from

small craft, and returning to Swinemünde to replenish their

ammunition.

The first lift by destroyer Z 34 involved 800 civilians and 120

wounded soldiers, and this cargo had the misfortune to arrive

at Swinemünde simultaneously with the warning of a major

raid by American B-I7s and B-24s:

There was a deathly hush on the bridge of the craft, and

we could already hear the dull drone of a large number of

heavy bombers reverberating from above the low-hanging

clouds. Vessels of all kinds were fleeing in panic from the

harbour. They rushed past us at full speed in an attempt to

reach the safety of the sea before the raid began.

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While the refugees were still below decks, Captain Hetz backed

away from the dockside, turned in the fareway and made for

the open sea:

We steamed out again at fifteen knots. We had just passed

the lighthouse when we heard the roar of a carpet of bombs

landing on the town and harbour of Swinemünde. A high

white wall signified where a line of bombs descended on the

exact place where we had turned. The paralysing tension

gradually relaxed, and while we were repassing the moles

on the way out two refugee children appeared on deck. They

were holding hands and laughing with joy. That made us

happier than anything for a long time. (Kurowski, 1987,

287-88)

On 16 March the shipment of the refugees and wounded was

completed. It was only just in time, for on that day the Poles

were reinforced by the 6th Leningrad Rocket Artillery Brigade,

and its Katyushas went into action immediately. By 17 March

the Germans were reduced to holding a strip which measured

1,800 metres long and 400 metres deep. The Poles were about

to break through to the west bank of the Persante, and in the

afternoon Fullriede decided that he had done everything that

was required of him, and that his last obligation was to save

his men 'for further operations in Germany.' The evacuation

went ahead overnight.

Lieutenant Hempel and a small rearguard beat off a final

attack, and left by destroyer Z 43 at 0630 on 18 March, which

set a seal on an operation which had been carried through to

a successful end on the narrowest margins of resources and

space. Goebbels kept the news of the fall of Kolberg out of the

communiqués, which must have sharpened Fullriede's appre-

hension, but in the event, the last German commandant of

Kolberg was rewarded with the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross

at the hands of the Führer on 26 March.

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CHAPTER 20

The Altdamm Bridgehead

IN GENERAL SHAPE, the Soviet East Pomeranian Operation may

be compared with a monstrous fleur-de-lys. The head was di-

rected at Kolberg and Köslin on the Baltic coastlands, while the

right-hand petal extended towards the Bight of Danzig. To the

left, or west, the flower curved towards the lower reaches of

the Oder in the neighbourhood of Stettin, where we take up

the sequence of events.

By the second week of March the only significant German

forces remaining on the eastern side of the Oder were von

Tettau's roving cauldron and the very diverse formations hold-

ing the Altdamm bridgehead, which extended for about eighty

kilometres from Greifenhagen in the south to the area of Goll-

now in the north. The town of Altdamm lay half-way between

the two, and was an outlying east-bank suburb of the city-port

of Stettin.

The Altdamm bridgehead was no beleaguered garrison, like

Königsberg, Danzig or Kolberg, for it backed directly onto the

heartland of the Reich, from where it received successive re-

inforcements. The defence was directed by the headquarters of

the Third Panzer Army, which deployed about 105,000 men on

its total frontage of rather more than 100 kilometres.

The terrain was excellent for purposes of defence. The high,

wooded and heavily broken Bruchheide extended like a screen

in front of the bridgehead, while the Oder River with its

branches, marshes and inundations secured the flanks and rear.

The Germans had good reason to stand their ground here, for

as long as they held the bridgehead, they

236

• kept open a sanctuary for refugees and broken troops from

East Pomerania;

• tied down large forces of the right flank of the 1st Belorussian

Front;

• barred an important entry to north central Germany;

• maintained communication with the important naval base of

Swinemünde and the open sea.

The first Russian effort against the bridgehead was a feeble

affair, which developed from 6 March, when the Forty-Seventh

Army pushed northwards down the Oder towards Greifen-

hagen, and the Sixty-First attacked frontally from the east (see

p. 195). Zhukov ended the initial effort on 12 March, for he

now recognised that the bridgehead could not be taken at a

rush. He withdrew the Third Shock Army for use in the forth-

coming Berlin Operation, but kept the Forty-Seventh Army,

the Sixty-First and the Second Guards Tank Army in place and

brought up four artillery breakthrough divisions, which per-

mitted him to attain a density of 250 to 280 pieces and mortars

per kilometre of breakthrough sector.

The Germans put the lull to good use, for it gave them time

to strengthen their already formidable positions. Moreover, the

Third Panzer Army had a new and energetic leader in General

Hasso von Manteuffel, who replaced Colonel-General Erhard

Raus on 10 March. When the Russians opened their new of-

fensive on 14 March, they not only encountered the reinforced

positions, but they came under fire from hitherto undetected

shore batteries and were hit by heavy local counterattacks.

On 15 March, however, Hitler ordered a number of mobile

units of the Third Panzer Army away from the front and re-

deployed them for operations in the direction of Küstrin, and

on the nineteenth the Soviet Forty-Seventh Army and the Sec-

ond Guards Tank Army broke through to the Oder south of

Altdamm, cutting the bridgehead in two. Manteuffel presented

Hitler with an ultimatum: 'Either withdraw everyone to safety

on the west bank of the Oder overnight, or lose the whole lot

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