Marshal Zhukov at the Oder E-Book

Tony Le Tissier

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 556

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

On 31 January 1945, in the dying months of the Second World War, the first Red Army troops reached the River Oder, barely 40 miles from Berlin. Everyone at Soviet Headquarters expected Marshal Zhukov's troops to bring the war quickly to an end. Despite bitter fighting by both sides, a bloody stalemate persisted for two months until the Soviet bridgeheads north and south of Küstrin were united and the Nazi fortress finally fell. Marshal Zhukov at the Order is an impressively detailed account of the Nazi–Soviet battles in the Oderbruch and for the Seelöw Heights, east of Berlin. They culminated in April 1945 with the last major land battle in Europe that proved decisive for the fate of Berlin – and the Third Reich. Drawing on official sources and the personal accounts of soldiers from both sides who were involved, Tony Le Tissier has reconstructed the Soviets' difficult breakthrough on the Oder, documenting the final death throes of Hitler's Thousand-Year Reich.

Leseprobe

First published in in 2008 by Sutton Publishing, an imprint of The History Press

This paperback edition published 2021

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

© Tony Le Tissier, 2008, 2021

The right of Tony Le Tissier to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 9844 4

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

Dedicated

to those who fought in these battles,

those defending their country and people,

those avenging the rape of theirs,

victims alike

of time and place.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The Battle of Berlin 1945

Jonathan Cape; St Martin’s Press, 1998

Revised by Tempus Publishing as The Battle of Berlin, 2007

Berlin Then and Now

After the Battle, 1992, reprinted 1997

Farewell to Spandau

Buchan & Enright, 1994

Revised edition, Sutton Publishing, 2008

Zhukov at the Oder

US edition, Praeger Publishers, 1995

Revised by Sutton Publishing as Marshal Zhukov at the Oder, 2008

Race for the Reichstag

Frank Cass & Co., 1999, 2001, paperback 2002

With Our Backs to Berlin

Sutton Publishing, 2001, paperback 2005

Death Was Our Companion

British and US editions by Sutton Publishing, 2003, paperback 2007

The Third Reich Then and Now

After the Battle, 2005

Slaughter at Halbe

British and US editions by Sutton Publishing, 2005, paperback 2007

Patton’s Pawns: The 94th US Infantry Division at the Siegfried Line

University of Alabama Press, 2007

Berlin Battlefield Guide – Third Reich & Cold War (in preparation)

Pen & Sword Publications, 2008

Helmut Altner’s ‘Berlin Dance of Death’ (translation)

British and US editions by Spellmount, 2002, paperback 2005

Reproduced by Tempus Publishing as Berlin Soldier, 2007

Contents

Preface

Conventions

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations and Symbols used on Maps

Part One: Deputy Supreme Commander

1. The Man

2. The Soviets

3. The Germans

Part Two: The Bridgeheads

4. The Vistula–Oder Operation

5. The Struggle for the Bridgeheads I

6. The Struggle for the Bridgeheads II

7. The Küstrin Corridor and Fortress

8. The East Pomeranian Operation

Part Three: Launching Operation Berlin

9. Planning and Logistics

10. Defence in Depth

11. Orders and Reconnaissance

Part Four: The Breakthrough Battle

12. First Day of Battle

13. Second Day of Battle

14. Third Day of Battle

15. Fourth Day of Battle

Part Five: Beyond The Breakthrough

16. The Fate of the German 9th Army

17. Stalin Rules

Appendices

   I Soviet Strengths for Operation Berlin – 1st Byelorussian Front

  II Combatant Strength of the German 9th Army on 15 April 1945

Notes

Bibliography

General Index

Armed Forces Index

List of Maps

1. The Race to the Oder

2. The Küstrin Factor

3. The Initial Bridgeheads

4. The Kienitz-Genschmar Sector

5. The Karlsbiese-Kienitz Sector

6. The Raegener Division in Action, 3–5 February 1945

7. The 33rd Army’s Bridgehead

8. The Soviet Attack of 2 March 1945

9. The Reitwein Spur

10. The Frankfurt Bridgehead

11. The Küstrin Battlefield

12. Closing the Corridor, 22–23 March 1945

13. The German Counteroffensive, 27–28 March 1945

14. The East Pomeranian Operation

15. Zhukov’s Deception Plan

16. The ‘Kurmark’ Corner

17. Zhukov’s Plan of 12 April 1945

18. The Northern Battlefield, 16–17 April 1945

19. The 47th Army’s and 3rd Shock Army’s Sectors, 16 April 1945

20. 5th Shock Army’s Sector, 16 April 1945

21. 8th Guards Army’s Sector, 16 April 1945

22. The Southern Battlefield

23. The 47th Army’s and 3rd Shock Army’s Sectors, 17 April 1945

24. 5th Shock Army’s Sector, 17 April 1945

25. The Seelow Sector and the ‘Stein-Stellung’, 17 April 1945

26. The Way Past Wriezen

27. The Advance on Müncheberg

28. The Northern Breach

29. The Müncheberg Breach

Preface

This book is a consequence of the collapse of Communism, the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic, all of which opened up avenues of knowledge hitherto denied the public in the interests of political correctness.

Unravelling what occurred in the decisive fighting in the Oderbruch and for the Seelow Heights during the early part of 1945 has proved a fascinating and rewarding task, in which the accounts of Soviet commanders, produced a good twenty years after the event and subject to the current party line, have been of only limited use, whereas German survivors’ accounts have proved very illuminating.

Conducting battlefield tours of the area for American, British and German groups convinced me of the need to write up this little-known element of relatively recent history, and I have been delighted with the generous response to my appeals for information from survivors and researchers alike. Sadly, and inevitably, some of my correspondents have died during the preparation of this work, which I hope will serve as a memorial to them and their contemporaries. Of course, in trying to understand what they went through, one cannot apply the freedoms of conscience and of choice of action that we enjoy today, for theirs was a world of rigid conformity and draconian discipline.

Conventions

The word ‘detachment’ as used for a subdivision of armoured and artillery regiments by the Germans (Abteilung) and Soviets, is translated as ‘battalion’ for convenience.

‘Frankfurt-an-der-Oder’, although not hyphenated in German, has been hyphenated here to conform to English usage, while the double ‘s’, as in ‘Booßen’, is given as ‘Boossen’.

Postwar variations of place-names used in the text are quoted in parentheses in the Index.

GDR alterations of names such as ‘Neu Lewin’ into ‘Neulewin’ have been ignored, but should be expected on current maps of the area. Where place names have been mentioned on maps, the map numbers are given in bold type in the Index.

Timings in Soviet accounts are presumed to be Moscow Time and have therefore been converted to German Summer Time.

Waffen-SS ranks are given as normal army equivalents, such as ‘SS-Major’ and so on.

The pattern of narration is generally north to south, east to west.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank most warmly all those who have so generously assisted me with source material and encouragement in compiling this book, many of whom are no longer alive:

Adolf Ayasse, Dr Fritz-Rudolf Averdieck, Erwin Bartmann, Willi Böse, Col Steve Bowman US Army, Heinz Breitscheidel, Frau Heidemarie Daher, Dr Anton Detter, Oberst aD Theodor von Dufving, Dr Erich Fellmann, Jürgen Fiehne, Hermann Freter, Ernst-Christian Gädtke, Prof. Dr (Med) Wolfgang Gebhardt, Oberst aD Horst Grabow, Erich Hachtel, Gerhard Hahn, Dorothée Freifrau and Ludwig Freiherr von Hammerstein-Equord, Oberst Winfried Heinemann, Dekan aD Hartmut Heinrici, Oberst aD Harry Hermann, GenLt aD Hans-Joachim von Hopffgarten, Alfons Jenewein, Friedrich Kaiser, Kurt Keller II, Frau Marianne Klein, Dr Hans-Werner Klement, Fritz Knüppel, Fritz Kohlase, Ulrich Köhler, Werner Kortenhaus, Erwin Kowalke, Prof. Dr Werner Kroemer, Erwin Kruse, Günter Labes, Dr Richard Lakowski, Oberst aD Dibbert Lang, GenMaj aD Rudi Lindner, Maj Vladimir V. Lukin, the ‘Mook wi’ Old Comrades Association of the 20th Panzergrenadier Division in Hamburg, Capt Thomas Pike US Army, Heinz Rall, Artur Römer, Oberstlt aD Wolfgang Ruff, Friedhelm Schöneck, Joachim Schneider, Richard Schulte, Julius M. Schultz, Hans-Ulrich Seebohm, Christian Seeger, Lt Col Jevgeni Simanovich, GenMaj aD Hans Spiegel, Helmut Stahl, Oberst aD Dr Karl Stich, Hans Sturm, Karl-Hermann Tams, Dr Hans J. Teller, Hermann Thrams, Gerd Wagner, Oberstlt aD Helmut Weber, Ottmar Weis, Lennart Westberg, Horst Wewetzer, Horst Wilke, Oberst aD E. Wittor, Col Tim Wray US Army, Oberst aD Horst Zobel.

I would also like to thank Progress Publishers, Moscow, for permission to quote from Soviet literary sources, and Chronos-Film GmbH for the use of photographs taken from original Soviet film footage in their archives.

Abbreviations and Symbols used on Maps

A

Army

Bbg

Brandenburg

BF

Byelorussian Front

Bks

Barracks

C

Corps

Fd Rep

Field Replacement

Feldh

Feldherrnhalle

FFR

Frankfurt Fortress Regiment

F Gr

Führer Grenadier

Fort

Fortress

Fus

Fusilier

GD

Grossdeutschland

GTA

Guards Tank Army

Kmk

Kurmark

Lt

Light

LW

Luftwaffe

Mbg

Müncheberg

Mtn

Mountain

1001 N

1001 Nights Battle Group

Pol

Polish

RAD

Reichsarbeitsdienst

SA

Shock Army

Stn

Station

Trg

Training

UF

Ukrainian Front

VAK

Volks Artillery Corps

VS

Volkssturm

Part One

Deputy Supreme Commander

Chapter 1

The Man

The artillery bombardment that launched Operation Berlin was the mightiest that had ever been recorded. It started with an ear-shattering crack as tens of thousands of guns, mortars and rockets of all calibres opened fire simultaneously. Every available weapon, whether specifically targeted or not, participated in the terrifying opening salvo of this 25-minute bombardment.

The volume of fire was so great that the earth trembled from the impact for miles around. In Berlin, some 40 miles away, telephones jumped off their cradles and pictures fell off the walls.

The orchestrator of this extraordinary event, with its cast of over three-quarters of a million players, was Marshal of the Soviet Union, Georgi Kontantinovich Zhukov. Marshal Zhukov was Deputy Supreme Commander of the Soviet Armed Forces, already twice Hero of the Soviet Union and undoubtedly the most outstanding military figure to emerge on the Soviet side during the Second World War, or the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945, as it was described in the Soviet Union.

Who, then, was this man, Zhukov?

Unfortunately the conventions of the Stalinist era allow us little insight into his true personality. Even today he is presented more like a cut-out picture of a hero, rather than a three-dimensional, human character. It seems that he was married twice and had three daughters, but the intensity and devotion with which he tackled his career could not have left much time for family life. Not even his own Reminiscences and Reflections give us much of a clue as to his real character and personality.

Zhukov was born into a poverty-stricken peasant family on 19 November 1896 in the village of Strelkova in the province of Kaluga. His father was a cobbler, while his mother worked in the fields or as a carter, all for pitifully little money. He had a sister two years older than himself and a younger brother who died within a year of birth. He attended the local village school for three years, as was the custom, leaving at the age of 10 with top marks and a yearning for further education. Shortly before his twelfth birthday he was apprenticed to his furrier uncle in Moscow on a four-and-a-half-year term. His uncle had clawed his way to being a successful businessman the hard way and ruthlessly exploited his staff, nephew included, demanding an 11-hour working day. Nevertheless, young Zhukov had acquired a zest for reading at his village school and after about a year he started attending night school. By the end of 1912 he had completed his apprenticeship and was a fully qualified furrier, continuing to work for his uncle.

Then came the First World War and in August 1915 Zhukov was conscripted into the cavalry. On completion of basic training with its lessons in brutal discipline, he was selected for NCO training and eventually sent to the front with a detachment of the 10th Dragoons. His subsequent war experience gained him two St George’s Crosses, one for capturing a German officer and another for a reconnaissance mission in which he was concussed by an exploding mine.

Zhukov then witnessed the collapse and disintegration of the Tsarist forces under revolutionary pressure before enlisting in the 4th Regiment of the 1st Moscow Cavalry Division of the Red Army in August 1918. This was a time when the newly founded Soviet government was under threat both from anti-Communist factions and troops sent into the country by the governments of Germany, France, the United Kingdom, the United States and Japan. Zhukov took an active part in the Civil War that ensued, and his service in the elite cavalry formations under commanders such as Timoshenko, Budyenny and Voroshilov, who were later to form part of Stalin’s inner circle, was to stand him in good stead. In September 1919 he was wounded by a hand grenade, the splinters of which entered his left side and thigh. While in hospital he contracted typhus and took some time to recover, but was then sent on a commanders’ course as a trainee sergeant major before returning to active service. As the war continued he gradually rose through the ranks through troop to squadron commander. On one day in 1921 he had two horses killed under him in action and was awarded the Order of the Red Banner for his deeds.

In May 1923, the Civil War over, he was appointed commander of the 39th Buzuluk Cavalry Regiment at the age of only 26 and began an intensive course of self-education in military science, at the same time engaging in the intensive training of his regiment for modern warfare, and adding a private 3 to 4 hours of study on top of a 12-hour working day. The following year he was sent to the Higher Cavalry School in Leningrad on what became a one-year course with three other students who were also to become Marshals of the Soviet Union: Bagramyan, Rokossovsky and Yeremenko. He returned in 1925 to the 7th Samara Cavalry Division, where he was given command of the new 39th Melekess-Pugachevsk Cavalry Regiment. In May Zhukov was promoted to commander of the 2nd Cavalry Brigade in the same division.

In late 1929 Zhukov was sent on a refresher course for higher-level commanders in Moscow. It was the highly interesting time of the exchange of military expertise under the secret clauses of the revised Russo-German Rapallo Pact of 1926. Contrary to some reports, however, Zhukov did not attend any of the staff courses held in Germany. A year later he was appointed Assistant Cavalry Inspector of the Red Army under the famous Marshal Budyenny, in which capacity he worked on cavalry combat training in close cooperation with the Combat Training Division. Much attention was paid to developing modern equipment and in particular to the evolution of a new kind of tank soldier and battlefield cooperation between mechanised, armoured, cavalry and infantry units.

In 1932 he was given command of the 4th Cavalry Division in Byelorussia. By 1935 this division had achieved such an all-round high standard of proficiency that Zhukov personally and the division were both awarded the Order of Lenin. In 1936 the division was renamed the 4th Don Cossack Division, and a year later Zhukov briefly assumed command of the 3rd Cavalry Corps before taking over the 6th Cossack Cavalry Corps. While continuing his military studies, he again concentrated on the combat use of cavalry within a mechanised army, seeing clearly that the future lay with armoured and mechanised formations. The horrific purge of army commanders in 1936 and 1937 left him untouched, presumably protected by the ‘cavalry club’ of Stalin’s close chums, but thereafter he is said to have kept a bag packed in case of sudden arrest. Then at the end of 1938 Zhukov was given the post of Deputy Commander of the 1st Byelorussian Military District, controlling the training of the cavalry units and tank brigades within the district, which in wartime would have given him command of a force of four to five cavalry divisions and three to four independent tank brigades.

At the beginning of June 1939 he was summoned to Moscow by the Commissar for Defence. There he was briefed on the Japanese army’s incursion into Mongolia, where the Red Army’s 57th Special Corps was deployed in support of the Mongolian army, before being flown out to report back on the situation. As a result of his subsequent reports, Zhukov was ordered to replace the corps commander, and the Soviet forces in Mongolia were heavily reinforced as the 1st Army Group. With these forces he conducted his first modern battle, inflicted a humiliating defeat on the Japanese at the end of August at the battle of Kharkin Kol, in which the Japanese sustained 50,000 casualties, including 18,000 killed, against Zhukov’s 9,000 casualties; the Japanese were driven back across the frontier. This victory gained him his first award of the gold medal of Hero of the Soviet Union.1

One of the army commanders not to come out too well of the situation as Zhukov had found it was Ivan Stepanovich Koniev, a recent convert from the role of political commissar in the Red Army. Zhukov’s success only exacerbated Koniev’s jealous annoyance, providing the seed for the bitter rivalry that was to ensue between them, carefully nurtured by Stalin for his own ends. As Boris Nicolaevsky wrote in his book Power and the Soviet Elite, Stalin, with his great talent for exploiting human weaknesses, had:

quickly sized up Koniev and cleverly used his feelings towards Zhukov. If we trace the history of Stalin’s treatment of the two soldiers, the chronology of their promotions and awards, we shall see that as early as the end of 1941 Stalin was grooming Koniev, the politician, as a rival whom he could play off against the real soldier, Zhukov. This was typical of Stalin’s foresight and bears all the marks of his style. He confers honours on Zhukov only when he has no choice, but on Koniev he bestowed them even when there was no particular reason for doing so. This was necessary in order to maintain the balance between the ‘indispensable organiser of victory’ and the even more indispensable political counterweight to him.2

Zhukov’s work in Mongolia fortunately kept him out of the Red Army’s debacle in the 1939–40 Winter War against Finland, and in May 1940 he was ordered back to Moscow, where he met Stalin for the first time. He was then given command of the Kiev Special Military District, the largest in the Soviet Union, as a full general under the Red Army’s new rank structure. Clearly both men made a good impression on each other at this first meeting. Stalin came to trust him and to respect his military ability, and their relationship became relatively close, bearing in mind Stalin’s inherent distrust of others. Zhukov was to accept Stalin’s authority without question, whether he thought him right or wrong, in the same spirit in which he demanded total obedience from his own subordinates.

On 1 February 1941 Zhukov was appointed Chief of the General Staff. The Red Army was in urgent need of reform and particularly weak in the quality of its commanders, as the war with Finland had shown. He wanted a well-disciplined, efficient army, properly organised and equipped, with the minimum political interference in the command structure, but time was too short. On 22 June the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in a surprise attack that swept aside the Red Army with ease and made enormous inroads into the country.

One of the measures taken by the Soviets to counter this emergency was to set up the Stavka of the Supreme Command. This was in effect a small discussion and briefing group which was to enable Stalin to make uncluttered decisions about the conduct of the war, and was a separate entity from both the State Defence Committee covering all aspects of the country’s commitment to war and the General Staff of the High Command.

The Stavka consisted of only seven members, including Stalin, his old chum Marshal Budyenny, his foreign adviser Molotov, and Zhukov as Chief of the General Staff. A system then evolved whereby members or delegates of the Stavka would be dispatched to trouble spots to report, advise and supervise as necessary, a role that Zhukov was destined to fulfil at least fifteen times in the Great Patriotic War, as this conflict came to be called.

Under this system, in due course operational plans drawn up by the individual fronts (or army groups) had first to be cleared by the General Staff for approval by the Stavka, whose operational reserves could then be allocated to ensure the success of specific tasks. One result of this was that no plan could be attributed to any individual commander.

However, the Stavka system enabled Stalin to play the role of supreme commander with increasing confidence, and Zhukov, despite his outstanding achievements, was to experience a gradual loss of influence with Stalin as the war progressed.

At the end of June 1941 Zhukov was sent to Kiev and Tarnopol to check on the South-Western Front, only to be abruptly relieved of his post as Chief of the General Staff after advising the abandonment of Kiev to an outraged Stalin. Instead, while retaining membership on the Stavka and the title of Deputy Commissar for Defence, he was appointed Commander of the Reserve Front, which was forming east of Smolensk. Almost immediately he became involved in the battle for Jelnya, winning the first Soviet victory of the war.

Shortly afterwards he was sent to organise the defence of Leningrad, taking over command of that Front and the Baltic Fleet from the totally incompetent Voroshilov. Within a month he had established a secure defensive system and restored the shattered morale. The Germans were checked in front of Leningrad, which they now proposed starving out while they switched their attention to Moscow. On 6 October Zhukov was recalled to resume command of the Reserve Front before Moscow, now under direct threat, and four days later the Reserve and Western Fronts were combined under his command as the new Western Front. The previous commander, Koniev, had just lost half a million men in the Vyazma/Bryansk pocket,3 but Zhukov asked for him to be kept on as his deputy, a post Koniev filled for only a week. This was the first time these two served together and it could not have been a happy combination. There followed the winter battle for Moscow, which was to last until April 1942 and bring a decisive victory over the German invaders.

The precariousness of Zhukov’s position vis-à-vis Stalin as the fledgling Supremo were clearly seen in early 1942 when the latter, exuberant over the success of Soviet arms before Moscow, called for a concerted counter-offensive on all fronts. Zhukov argued that there were insufficient resources for such a venture and recommended a concentration of effort on his own front, where he could guarantee a measure of success, while standing firm on the others. Stalin refused to accept this argument and pressed ahead with his plan. Zhukov dutifully struck out at Army Group Mitte, into whose rear area he made deep penetrations by the skilful use of cavalry and paratroops, but meanwhile Stalin was milking Zhukov’s front to reinforce others, with the result that the operation failed to achieve its aim of destroying the German army group.

Stalin remained convinced that the Germans would try for Moscow once more with their summer offensive, whereas all indications were that they were planning something in the south, and again in March he pressed for a general counter-offensive. It was only when the Germans thrust out towards Stalingrad and the Caucasus that Stalin realised that his miscalculations in the military field had led to this major disaster. Zhukov was recalled to Moscow on 26 August, appointed Deputy Supreme Commander and sent off to Stalingrad to clear up the mess. Before leaving he obtained Stalin’s consent to the restoration of unitary command, clipping the powers of the commissars that had been introduced in the panic of the invasion the previous year, thus greatly simplifying the command function. Within three months of Zhukov’s arrival the Soviets were able to launch massive attacks on the flanks of the German salient, closing the ring on the German 6th Army, which was eventually forced to capitulate on 2 February 1943 after one of the most humiliating defeats in German history. On 19 January, the day the German blockade of Leningrad was broken, Zhukov was promoted the first Marshal of the Soviet Union, but by this time he was investigating a failure by Koniev to eliminate a German salient as Stalin had ordered. Zhukov’s promotion coincided with the reintroduction of shoulder boards denoting rank in the Soviet Armed Forces and also the recognition of a separate officer status. A month later he received the first Order of Suvorov (First Class) awarded for his triumph at Stalingrad.

Zhukov’s next major task was the planning, preparation and conduct of the battle of Kursk, where it was correctly anticipated that in opening their summer offensive the Germans would attempt to reduce the Soviet salient astride that city from their own salients to the north and south. In this role he was instrumental in persuading the Stavka to amass huge reserves for the battle.

The German attack on 4 July was immediately met by a devastating artillery barrage and by such a dense net of anti-tank defences that during the first week of the action the Soviets claimed to have destroyed nearly 3,000 German tanks and killed 70,000 German troops. Soviet losses were even higher but they could afford them better than the Germans. By 27 August the German salients had been eliminated and the Soviets were poised to cross the barrier of the Dnieper and liberate the Ukraine.

Stalin was now pressing for the liberation of Soviet territory and Zhukov was given the task of supervising the Voronezh and Steppe Fronts, the latter under Koniev. These were shortly to be renamed the 1st and 2nd Ukrainian Fronts respectively. Bridgeheads were established across the Dnieper, and Kiev taken as the Soviet armies drove west. However, when the commander of the 1st Ukrainian Front was wounded in action, Zhukov was obliged to take over, dropping his responsibility for the supervision of the 2nd Ukrainian Front, thus for the first time becoming a fellow front commander to Koniev in March 1944. Zhukov’s front launched an attack that advanced them 350km in five weeks, bringing him the first Order of Victory to be awarded.

Zhukov was then briefly recalled to Moscow to work on the plans for a summer offensive for the retaking of Byelorussia, code-named Operation Bagration, leaving the 1st Ukrainian Front temporarily in Koniev’s hands. At the end of May Zhukov was detailed to supervise the 1st and 2nd Byelorussian Fronts and, in the second phase of the operation, the 1st Ukrainian Front as well. The offensive was launched on 23 and 24 June, and by the middle of August the Soviet troops had closed up to the Vistula opposite Warsaw and established bridgeheads on the west bank further south. This success gained Zhukov his second award of the golden star of a Hero of the Soviet Union.

Zhukov’s next task was to supervise the 3rd Ukrainian Front’s assault on Bulgaria, which turned out to be a walkover as the Bulgarians met the Soviets with open arms, overthrowing their fascist government as they did so.

Zhukov returned to the supervision of the 1st and 2nd Byelorussian Fronts at the end of September 1944, but the following month he was summoned back to Moscow once more. Stalin told Zhukov that the western front had been so shortened by their advance, and with it the number of individual fronts so reduced, that from now on they would all be controlled directly from the Stavka. Zhukov would have command of the 1st Byelorussian Front aimed at Berlin and would retain his title of Deputy Supreme Commander, meaningless though they both knew it to be. Marshal Rokossovsky would move over from the 1st to the 2nd Byelorussian Front, while Marshal Koniev would retain the 1st Ukrainian Front.

Zhukov must have been greatly disappointed by this decision, for he already had experience of supervising the three fronts concerned in Operation Bagration, and he had fully expected Stalin to focus his attention on the forthcoming operations in Hungary, where much of the remaining German resources were being concentrated in defence of the only remaining oilfields available to them. But it was not to be; he was to revert to being a Front commander. In effect it was a serious and humiliating demotion for him, placing him on a par with Koniev, his deadly rival and previous subordinate.

As early as July of that year Stalin had been talking as if he assumed the war with Germany was already won, and was discussing the possible political and military results. Now he was planning on these lines, with the political factors far outweighing the military ones. The implications for Zhukov emerge within the span of this book, which describes how all his leadership qualities were put to the test in the final stages of the war.

Again Zhukov wanted to see the Red Army well disciplined, proficient and well led by professionally minded officers. Although he had been a member of the Communist Party since 1919, he remained openly hostile to the inclusion of political commissars in the command structure of the Red Army, a daring position to take in the political climate of the day. His rival Koniev stemmed from that source, but his friend Konstantin Konstantinovich Rokossovsky, who had been one of the victims of Stalin’s purge, imprisoned and tortured, sentenced to death and then released and rehabilitated to use his skills of command in the Great Patriotic War with the sentence still hanging over him, served as a constant reminder of the precariousness of all their positions.

Marshal A.M. Vasilevsky, who served with Zhukov as a member of the Stavka in a similar role, wrote of his colleague’s strategic ability and planning:

In the constellation of Soviet generals who so conclusively defeated the armies of Nazi Germany, he was the most brilliant of all.

At all stages of the war, in strategic, tactical and organisational matters, Zhukov was always clear-headed and sharp, bold in his decisions, skilled in finding his bearings, in anticipating developments and picking the right instant for a decisive stroke. Making the most fateful of decisions, he was astoundingly cool and level headed. He was a man of extraordinary courage and self-possession. I have never seen him flustered or depressed not even at critical moments. On the contrary, at moments like that he was only more forceful, more resolute, and more concentrated.4

In fact Zhukov had two senior political commissars on the staff of the 1st Byelorussian Front, Lt Gen K.F. Telegin as his ‘Member of the War Council’ and Lt Gen S.F. Galadzev as his Head of the Political Department, both of whom carried more weight than his other heads of arms and services.5

In his early days of command Zhukov had had a reputation for firmness and fairness in his dealings with his men, not asking of them more than he could do himself, although his own standards of fitness, horsemanship and general competence were high. As he grew older and more senior in rank he had become increasingly intolerant of incompetence in officers and other commanders. It is said that his bodyguard doubled as a mobile court-martial and execution squad. He was known to have a fierce temper and to ride roughshod over his subordinates, who both feared and respected him, but his popular image with the troops was as the bringer of victory – and they knew that he too had gone through the ranks the hard way.

Nevertheless, he had a reputation for utter determination and ruthlessness in achieving his objectives, regardless of the cost in human lives, and for demanding instant and absolute obedience to orders. In an army of millions the keys to success lay in strategy, logistics and determination, and Zhukov was master of all three. He laid great emphasis on personal reconnaissance and concise briefings. Having ensured good planning and adequate resources for the attack, he left the execution to his subordinates, ensuring that they gained their objectives, irrespective of the cost.

Here we see the contrast with his Western counterparts, whose experiences in the First World War had made them and their home countries opposed to any wastage of human life. But in Stalin’s Soviet Union with its millions of deaths through imposed starvation, deportation and indiscriminate massacre, human life was of little account. Military reports quoted enemy losses but did not bother with their own. Of the over 20 million deaths of Soviet citizens originally attributed to the Great Patriotic War, Russian historians now attribute less than 10 million to deaths on the battlefield or in German captivity.6

Chapter 2

The Soviets

At the beginning of 1945 the Soviets had some 6,000,000 troops on their western front facing some 2,100,000 Germans and their allies. Rather than deploy them evenly across the front, the Soviets maintained a system of reserves under the Stavka that enabled them to concentrate an even greater superiority in numbers in men and equipment at their points of main effort when required.

The Red Army in the field was sustained by the Soviet Union’s own massive industrial effort and lend-lease items provided by the Western Allies. For instance, at this stage in the war about two-thirds of all Soviet military vehicles were of American origin, many of the troops wore boots and uniforms of either British or American manufacture, and the front-line troops existed almost entirely on American-supplied concentrated foodstuffs. Their devastated heartland was quite incapable of sustaining such vast numbers of men in the field unaided, and these US vehicles provided their armies with the necessary mobility to defeat the Axis forces ranged against them. The Germans thus tended to regard the arrival of an Allied convoy in Russia as the herald of the next offensive.1

Despite all the difficulties involved, Soviet industry in 1944 alone was able to produce a staggering 29,000 tanks and self-propelled assault guns (SPGs), 122,500 guns and mortars, 40,300 aircraft and 184 million shells, mines and bombs.2

The Soviet lines of communication were based on their railway system, linking their fronts with the war industries, ports and sundry centres of production. The distances involved were enormous, with nearly 2,000 miles separating the war industries grouped in the Ural Mountains from the Vistula, and half the lease-lend supplies coming all the way across Siberia from the Pacific ports. The Russian gauge being wider than the European, the railway tracks had to be adapted and repaired as they advanced across Poland into Germany. This was usually done by ripping up the four pins holding a rail to each sleeper and re-laying with only two pins, a system that was speedy of execution but led to a weaker track. Railheads were then set up as close to the front as circumstances allowed, from where local distribution was effected by horse and motor transport.3

However, it should be noted that Red Army establishments were frequently well under strength and that even at full strength a Red Army division was only half the size of its German equivalent.

The quality of the troops in the various arms was reflected by the system of allocation of recruits, which was by order of intelligence rating to the air arm, artillery, engineers, armour and finally infantry. However, manpower was beginning to run short, so released prisoners of war and slave labourers were promptly armed and incorporated into the infantry formations, a measure which did nothing to increase their quality.

Formations within or combining these arms were again divided into various categories. Of these the elite were those with the ‘Guards’ appellation, which was awarded to regiments and superior formations that had distinguished themselves in battle, such as Chuikov’s 64th Army, which had been renamed the 8th Guards Army after the battle of Stalingrad. This title brought increased rations but also demanded the maintenance of the highest standards in discipline, training and combat. Guards, regiments and formations could be found throughout the first echelon formations, but when grouped into Guards armies they normally carried more firepower than others, and their establishments tended to be larger.4

The cavalry formations remained an elite from the Civil War, all bearing Guards titles, and incorporated a mechanised element as developed in the interwar years. This arm was by no means obsolete, for with the vast, wild expanses involved in the Great Patriotic War, the cavalry provided a vital extension to the scope of the mobile and foot elements of other arms. Small mounted detachments also served in the traditional role as scouts and messengers in the infantry units.

The air force remained subordinate to the army, and was divided into Strategic, Tactical and Transport Commands. The Strategic Command of long-range bombers was the least used and least effective, but the Tactical Command had a wide range of combat aircraft, and was used extensively as another form of artillery support in the front line. In concept the air force was primarily another battlefield arm, an extension of the artillery, with little strategic value.5

The Il-2 Shturmovik fighter-bomber was the most popular aircraft for the ground-attack role. Late in 1944 air liaison units were attached to the headquarters of armies, corps and leading brigades to provide radio links for the improvement of air–ground liaison. Even if the liaison units’ radios failed it was still technically possible to communicate through the tanks’ own radios.6

Curiously, the Po-2, an open two-seater biplane, was also extensively used for artillery spotting and reconnaissance purposes, but particularly for night bombing in First World War style, with the observer dropping light bombs or clusters of grenades by hand. The Germans called them ‘sewing-machines’ after the sound of the engine but they were effective enough in harassing the front-line areas at night, and were often flown by all-female crews.

The primary role of the engineers was to be found in bridging the various water obstacles encountered. The main resources were held at Front level, but allowance had to be made for far-penetrating mobile units to have adequate bridging resources. For instance, a tank army would require three to four girder bridges, two of them with a capacity of 60 tons, apart from its supporting arms requirements.7

The artillery was regarded by the Soviets as the king of the battlefield and came to be used in concentrations of enormous density when Stavka reserves were allocated in support of specific operations. The backbone of the artillery was provided by the 76mm and 122mm towed guns, but there were also independent artillery regiments of extra powerful artillery pieces like the 152mm mounted on an open tracked carriage. Another artillery weapon was the 120mm mortar.

A particularly strong element of the artillery was formed by armoured self-propelled guns (SPGs) known as the SU-76, SU-85, SU-100 and the JSU-122 and JSU-152, carrying guns of those calibres, mounted on tank chassis and, except for the JU-76, all fully enclosed and organised into independent regiments according to type. However, the open-topped SU-76 was the most common. Originally a tank-destroyer, the 76.2mm gun with sixty rounds that it carried in an open superstructure on a T-70 tank chassis was no longer suitable for that role, so it was now deployed in direct infantry support as a light assault gun, and organised into battalions of three batteries, each of four guns. The SU-122, mounted on a KV tank chassis, was organised in medium SPG regiments of sixteen guns and used in support of infantry divisions. Then came the heavy assault guns in the form of the SU-152 on a KV tank chassis, and the JSU-122 and and JSU-152 on a Stalin tank chassis, all of the calibres indicated being organised into Guards heavy SPG brigades consisting of twelve batteries with sixty-five guns in all.8

A devastating addition to this armoury was the Katyusha multiple-rocket launcher mounted on open truck-beds and known to the Germans as Stalin-Organs. Various versions were produced, the original mounting thirty-six rockets of 82mm with a range of 6,000m. The largest rockets were 310mm. These devastating weapons were issued to specially formed Guards units of NKVD troops.9

The Soviets also had a comprehensive anti-aircraft artillery organisation for the protection of their troops and installations.

The Soviet armour was very good indeed. By concentrating production on just a few simplified designs, the Russians had produced some of the most outstanding fighting vehicles so far in the war, roughly finished though they might appear. The new 60-ton JS-2 Stalin tank carried a powerful 122mm gun and twenty-eight shells with separate cartridges for it, a formidable fighting machine. But the main component of the Soviet armoured forces was the robust 36-ton T-34/85 with an 85mm gun and carrying seventy-six rounds. There was also the light T-70 tank with its 45mm gun, which was used mainly for the protection of tactical headquarters in battle. However, radios were scarce and generally limited to commanders’ vehicles, so that communication between tanks in action was often difficult. The Guards armoured units were usually equipped with the latest Stalin and T-34/85 tanks, but the 2nd Guards Tank Army was particularly well supplied with American equipment, including M4 Sherman tanks, several thousand of which had been provided under lend-lease, this presumably being the 76mm gun version, and a few British Valentines. However, Soviet production figures for 1944 amounted to a record 29,000 tanks and self-propelled assault guns (SPGs), of which 2,000 were JS-2s, 11,000 T-34/85s, and over 3,000 SPGs with guns of 100mm, 122mm and 152mm calibre.

For tank destroyers the Soviets had the SU-85 and SU-100, carrying forty-eight and thirty-four rounds respectively, mounted on a T-34 chassis, the SU-85 being organised into battalions of twenty-one guns, and the SU-100 into Guards SPG brigades of sixty-five guns each.10

In support of this armour there was a most effective system of vehicular recovery and repair through damaged vehicle assembly points, whose workshops were able to put back into service a good half of all such vehicles recovered.11

At the bottom of the scale, the infantry were divided between Guards, Shock and normal infantry armies, these sometimes being organised as combined-arms armies, that is, each consisting of three infantry and one armoured corps. The Shock armies had stronger artillery resources than the normal infantry armies, being designed to breach enemy fortifications at the beginning of an offensive.12

The remaining infantry armies were generally of a much lower calibre. Although well equipped with light arms, their artillery and all their transport was horse-drawn. Having the lowest priorities for clothing and rations, their uniforms were often in rags and they were expected to virtually live off the land. Consequently, on the move they presented an extraordinary spectacle, reminiscent of previous Asiatic invasions, with livestock being driven alongside ungainly caravans of commandeered wagons piled high with loot. Their training was minimal and their discipline poor, authority often being exercised by their officers at pistol point.13

Human life was of little value in Soviet considerations, least of all in the penal units, of which each Front had up to three battalions and each army from five to ten companies. Prisoners originally of field officer rank and upwards were sent to the penal battalions and those of junior officer rank downwards to the penal companies, all as ‘penal privates’, where they could regain their rank and decorations either by distinguished conduct, posthumously after being killed in action, or after fully recovering from wounds as fit to return to duty. These units were used for the most difficult and dangerous tasks, such as swamping enemy positions by sheer weight of numbers, or for advancing first over unswept minefields to clear the way for others. Not only did these units cater for the disciplinary cases, but they were also a convenient means of purging real or potential opponents of the regime from the ranks.14

The 1st Byelorussian Front had a chemical warfare battalion equipped with poison gas with it in the field, but this was not used. Other chemical warfare battalions at army level specialised in laying smoke screens to cover various operations.

Discipline in the Red Army varied greatly from unit to unit, but throughout it bouts of heavy drinking would lead to serious breakdowns in discipline and acts of violence. Generally the Soviet soldier had a good relationship with his officers, which was not so readily extended to the commissars, for whom he had a natural distrust, despite his gullibility. His basic characteristics were those of the Russian peasant, and the qualities of patriotism, obstinacy, tenacity, endurance and cunning stood him in good stead as a soldier. He tended to be unpredictable in his moods and could easily become apathetic, morose or unruly in his behaviour. Although slow-witted and cautious in his approach, he was by no means lacking in courage.15

Each Soviet army had from one to three NKVD (Ministry of the Interior) regiments attached, depending upon the situation. These units were not intended for use as fighting troops, but for providing a rear screen to the parent formation, preventing desertion, and for controlling the civilian population in the rear areas.16

The part played by women in the Soviet armed forces should not be underestimated. They were to be found extensively in the Rear Services in all sorts of roles, but were also to be found in the combatant units as signallers and down to company level as medical orderlies as well as political workers; some even formed tank, infantry and engineer units or specialised as snipers. Some drove the amphibious vehicles used in assault river crossings, and there were all-female squadrons flying the Po-2 biplane night bomber previously mentioned.17

Also fighting under Soviet command were the recently raised 1st Polish Army, soon to be joined by the 2nd, the 1st Polish Composite Air Corps with 390 combat aircraft, and various other Polish units, including a tank brigade and a cavalry brigade. These had originally been founded from those prisoners taken when Poland was overrun in 1939. They had not been able to join those released in 1941 to found the units now fighting under British command. Their numbers had later been augmented by partisans and recruits called to the colours by the so-called Lublin government after the ‘liberation’ of their country. However, there was a dearth of leaders in the Polish ranks, especially officers, due to the deliberate culling of the Polish intelligensia conducted by the NKVD in 1940 at Katyn and other places. Consequenly most of the senior officers were Russians with Polish roots who had served anything up to fifteen years in the Red Army, which also had to supply some 13,000 specialists and NCOs to augment the Polish ranks.18

The Red Army depended upon its officer corps for the maintenance of discipline rather than on the NCO backbone found in most other national armies. Morale was the responsibility of commissars and political workers under the Political Department who were to be found at every level. The higher command structure coordinated by the Stavka under Stalin has already been described. Once the operational plans had been agreed at these levels, the Front commanders had some freedom of interpretation of the general principles. Lesser-formation commanders were grouped into military councils with their chiefs of staff and political advisers, the latter being known simply as ‘Member of the Military Council’, and were allowed some initiative in the execution of their orders; but none was allowed at unit level, where immediate and unquestioning fulfilment was demanded upon pain of death.19

The Russian style of fighting still basically involved using troops on a massive scale, flooding the battlefield with men in successive waves, advancing almost shoulder to shoulder, attacking time after time with complete disregard for casualties until the objective was taken. In the latter part of the war they were to use tanks in the same manner and to prepare the way with earth-shattering bombardments from massed artillery and rocket-launchers. Facing up to such attacks required strong nerves from skilled soldiers.

Chapter 3

The Germans

In contrast to the tight system of centralised control exercised by the Soviets, the German command structure was an uneasy mess. Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the Third Reich and Supreme Commander of the German Armed Forces, exercised his authority from remote command posts in which he had become increasingly removed from the reality of the world in which his subjects lived, suffered, fought and died unheeded. On 16 January 1945 he moved into his new command bunker beneath the Old Chancellery in the Wilhelmstrasse.1

During the years of Nazi rule Hitler had established himself as an absolute dictator, who expressed his will to the nation by means of Führer-Orders and Führer-Decrees, while the rest of the Nazi leaders indulged in a behind-the-scenes struggle for power among themselves. His physical and mental health had suffered considerably from the strains of office, lack of exercise and quite possibly the attentions of his private physician, Professor Morrell, whose prescriptions have subsequently aroused some criticism. The assassination attempt of 20 July 1944 had done nothing to alleviate this condition, and since then a baleful mistrust of the General Staff, and also of Göring and his Luftwaffe, had been grafted on to his megalomania and ferocious despotism.2

He firmly believed that his presence alone was sufficient to galvanise all energies in the right direction, and that all orders to retreat, however justifiable, inevitably led to disaster. He also believed that the situation was bound to change in his favour, this belief being based partly on the expected appearance of some new secret weapons (for which there were no longer any production facilities), partly on the conviction that the Allies would fall out when the Anglo-American armies met up with the Soviets, and partly on an absolute faith in his own star.3

His entourage did everything to encourage him in these beliefs, and nothing to bring a sense of reality to the Führerbunker during this final stage of the war. Were the consequences not so drastic, the events in the bunker would have all the elements of a farce. In an oppressive atmosphere of noisy air-conditioning and sweating concrete walls, with no distinction between night and day, Hitler’s courtiers kept up their internecine struggle with malicious gossip, slandering those absent and disguising the truth from each other. Despite Hitler’s obvious deterioration, his presence overwhelmed reason and sane judgement in all of them, and his military staff were as obsequious as the rest.4

The General Staff, once a strong contender in the power struggle, had been utterly broken by the purge following the unsuccessful assassination attempt of 20 July 1944, and its representatives in his entourage were now mere sycophants. Only Col Gen Heinz Guderian, who had been appointed Chief of Staff of the Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH Army GHQ) following the coup, had the nerve to stand up to him, but this led to endless rows and eventually Guderian’s dismissal. Permanently with Hitler in the Führerbunker was Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, nominal Chief of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW Armed Forces GHQ) with his headquarters in Berlin-Dahlem, but in practice acting as Hitler’s personal Chief of Staff and issuing orders in the Führer’s name. The OKW Chief of Staff, Col Gen Alfred Jodl, and Guderian were obliged to spend most of their time shuttling back and forth between the Führerbunker conferences and their own secret wartime headquarters in the vast bunkers known as Maybach I and II respectively, some 20 miles south of the city at Zossen-Wünsdorf.5

In December 1941 Hitler had supplemented his role as Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces by taking over as Commander in Chief of the Army with the following announcement:

Anyone can do the little job of directing operations in war. The task of the Commander in Chief is to educate the Army to be National Socialist. I do not know any Army General who can do this the way I want it done. I have therefore decided to take over command of the Army.

He then further complicated the command structure by directing the Eastern Front operations exclusively through the OKH, whose responsibilities in other theatres were then given to the OKW, thus obliging the two headquarters to compete against each other over resources for their respective spheres of responsibility.6

His attitude to the General Staff, of whose work he insisted on approving every detail, comes out clearly in this outburst to Guderian on one occasion:

There’s no need for you to try and teach me. I’ve been commanding the German Army in the field for five years and during that time I’ve had more practical experience than any gentlemen of the General Staff could ever hope to have. I’ve studied Clausewitz and Moltke and read all the Schlieffen papers. I’m more in the picture than you are!7

One has to read Col Gen Heinz Guderian’s book to realise how intolerable Hitler’s conduct as a commander was towards the General Staff and what pressure officers like himself were placed under as a result. For instance, in January 1945 as the Soviets lauched their Vistula–Oder Operation and the fall of Warsaw was imminent, the heads of Guderian’s Operations Department, a colonel and two lieutenant colonels, were arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo over the pertinent signals and their reactions to them. Although Guderian took full responsibility and suggested he be interrogated rather than lose that vital element of his staff, it was only after lengthy, time and energy-wasting interrogations that he could ill afford, that the two lieutenant colonels were released, but the colonel was shunted around from one concentration camp to another until captured by the Americans. The essence of the problem lay in Hitler’s Führer system of unquestioning obedience to orders clashing with the General Staff’s system of mutual trust and exchange of ideas, all this against a background of Hitler’s class consciousness and genuine distrust of the General Staff following the failed putsch.8

Hitler’s last headquarters in the Führerbunker suffered the serious defect of not being equipped with the normal communications facilities of the Führer headquarters he had set up and occupied elsewhere in Europe during the course of the war. This was in part due to scale, for accommodation was extremely cramped in the Führerbunker itself, although more space could have been made available in the bombproof shelters beneath the New Chancellery building. However, the only communications facilities installed in the Führerbunker were a one-man switchboard, one radio transmitter and a radio telephone, which was dependent upon an aerial suspended from a balloon over the Funkturm (radio tower) 6km away.9

The head of the Luftwaffe, the once flamboyant Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, had been rightly blamed for its many shortcomings and was now a discredited figure, but he still occasionally attended conferences in order to display his loyalty to the Führer.10

Joseph Goebbels, like the other party leaders, combined several titles and responsibilities acquired in the scramble for power. Although most commonly known for his role as Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, he remained the original Gauleiter of Berlin, and was now also Reichs Defence Commissar for Wehrkreis III (Berlin-Brandenburg). To counter depression and defeatism his Ministry issued an endless stream of propaganda, which continued to hold out hope until the very end, while simultaneously threatening traitors and defeatists with the most dire penalties.

One of Goebbels’ responsibilities as Gauleiter was the raising of the Berlin quota of Volkssturm units as part of the overall concept for defence. The Volkssturm had originally been raised the previous autumn as a form of home guard, intended purely for local defence and fortification construction, from men of 16 years upwards capable of bearing arms in an emergency but otherwise not physically fit for active service. The majority came from the upper age bracket and included many First World War veterans. They were organised into companies and battalions in their home districts, but with no set establishments, so that the Berlin battalions varied in strength from 600 to 1,500. Unit commanders were appointed by the party, some being veterans with military experience and a strong sense of duty, others mere political warriors. The only common issue was an armband, uniforms being either varied (even captured British battledress being used) or non-existent. Training was conducted at weekends and in the evenings when there was no construction work to do, and some three-day courses were offered at SA camps, but no Volkssturm troops were trained up to the combat role that came to be expected of them as the enemy engulfed their homeland. The Wehrmacht had no responsibility for this party-sponsored organisation in the Home Guard role, which was meant to be armed, equipped and maintained entirely from local resources, but was obliged to take over those units later committed to the Eastern Front.11

However, in his capacity as a Reichs Defence Commissar, Goebbels took an active interest in events on the Eastern Front, making frequent visits of inspection and liaising directly with the field commanders.

Hitler’s system of leadership was reflected in the state and composition of the German Armed Forces. One particularly confusing aspect was the use of corps and army headquarters taken out of reserve to command new formations to which they automatically gave their titles, irrespective of their composition or function. Thus the Vth SS Mountain Corps commanded only one Waffen-SS formation and no mountain troops, and the XIth SS Panzer Corps consisted primarily of ordinary infantry units.12

The basic framework of the German ground forces was still that of the army, most commonly known by the overall title of the Wehrmacht. However, after the abortive coup of 20 July 1944, the army had been seriously weakened by the great purge of officers that followed and by the Nazi leaders’ distrust of the survivors. Political officers (NS-Führungsoffiziere) had been appointed to all units and formation headquarters for the purpose of promoting the Nazi spirit and to spy on possible dissidents. Reichsführer-SS and Chef-der-Deutschen-Polizei (State SS and Police Chief) Heinrich Himmler, who was also Minister of the Interior, had been given command of the Reserve or Home Army, an appointment of considerable influence in the army hierarchy, covering as it did all recruitment, training, development and allocation of equipment. Since then all new recruits had been assigned to the newly constituted Volkswehr (People’s Army) of Volks Grenadier (Infantry) and Volks Artillery units, which were intended to form the nucleus of a more politically reliable postwar army. The latter were also given priority of equipment over the army, which thus suffered deficiencies of the same important equipment that the Volkswehr then wasted through lack of combat experience.