Vistula–Oder Offensive

In the wake of the successful Operation Bagration, the 1st Belorussian Front managed to secure two bridgeheads west of the Vistula river between 27 July and 4 August 1944.[4] The Soviet forces remained inactive during the failed Warsaw uprising that started on 1 August, though their frontline was not far from the insurgents. The 1st Ukrainian Front captured an additional large bridgehead at Sandomierz (known as the Baranow bridgehead in German accounts), some 200 km south of Warsaw, during the Lvov–Sandomierz Offensive.[5]

Preceding the offensive, the Red Army had built up large amounts of materiel and manpower in the three bridgeheads. The Red Army greatly outnumbered the opposing Wehrmacht in infantry, artillery, and armour. All this was known to German intelligence. General Reinhard Gehlen, head of Fremde Heere Ost, passed his assessment to Heinz Guderian. Guderian in turn presented the intelligence results to Adolf Hitler, who refused to believe them, dismissing the apparent Soviet strength as "the greatest imposture since Genghis Khan".[6] Guderian had proposed to evacuate the divisions of Army Group North trapped in the Courland Pocket to the Reich via the Baltic Sea to get the necessary manpower for the defence, but Hitler forbade it. In addition, Hitler commanded that one major operational reserve, the troops of Sepp Dietrich's 6th Panzer Army, be moved to Hungary to support Operation Frühlingserwachen.

The offensive was brought forward from 20 January to 12 January because meteorological reports warned of a thaw later in the month, and the tanks needed hard ground for the offensive. It was not done to assist American and British forces during the Battle of the Bulge, as Stalin chose to claim at Yalta.[7]

The offensive commenced in the Baranow bridgehead at 04:35 on 12 January with an intense bombardment by the guns of the 1st Ukrainian Front against the positions of the 4th Panzer Army.[16] Concentrated against the divisions of XLVIII Panzer Corps, which had been deployed across the face of the bridgehead, the bombardment effectively destroyed their capacity to respond; a battalion commander in the 68th Infantry Division stated that "I began the operation with an understrength battalion [...] after the smoke of the Soviet preparation cleared [...] I had only a platoon of combat effective soldiers left".[17]

The initial barrage was followed by probing attacks and a further heavy bombardment at 10:00. By the time the main armored exploitation force of the 3rd Guards and 4th Tank Armies moved forward four hours later, the Fourth Panzer Army had already lost up to ⅔ of its artillery and ¼ of its troops.[18]

The Soviet units made rapid progress, moving to cut off the defenders at Kielce. The armored reserves of the 4th Panzer Army's central corps, the XXIV Panzer Corps, were committed, but had suffered serious damage by the time they reached Kielce, and were already being outflanked. The XLVIII Panzer Corps, on the Fourth Panzer Army's southern flank, had by this time been completely destroyed, along with much of Recknagel's XLII Corps in the north. Recknagel himself would be killed by Polish partisans on 23 January. By 14 January, the 1st Ukrainian Front had forced crossings of the Nida river, and began to exploit towards Radomsko and the Warthe. The 4th Panzer Army's last cohesive formation, the XXIV Panzer Corps held on around Kielce until the night of 16 January, before its commander made the decision to withdraw.

World War II Eastern Front during the 1945 Vistula-Oder offensive; the map also shows the East Prussian Offensive, Lower Silesian Offensive, the East Pomeranian Offensive, and the battles in Courland. See here for an accurate map.

The 1st Belorussian Front, to Konev's north, opened its attack on the German 9th Army from the Magnuszew and Puławy bridgeheads at 08:30, again commencing with a heavy bombardment.[19] The 33rd and 69th Armies broke out of the Puławy bridgehead to a depth of 30 km (19 mi), while the 5th Shock and 8th Guards Armies broke out of the Magnuszew bridgehead. The 2nd and 1st Guards Tank Armies were committed after them to exploit the breach. The 69th Army's progress from the Puławy bridgehead was especially successful, with the defending LVI Panzer Corps disintegrating after its line of retreat was cut off. Though the 9th Army conducted many local counter-attacks, they were all brushed aside; the 69th Army ruptured the last lines of defence and took Radom, while the 2nd Guards Tank Army moved on Sochaczew and the 1st Guards Tank Army was ordered to seize bridgeheads over the Pilica and attack towards Łódź.[20] In the meantime, the 47th Army had crossed the Vistula and moved towards Warsaw from the north, while the 61st and 1st Polish Armies encircled the city from the south.[21]

The only major German response came on 15 January, when Hitler (against the advice of Guderian) ordered the Panzerkorps Großdeutschland of Dietrich von Saucken from East Prussia to cover the breach made in the sector of the 4th Panzer Army, but the advance of Zhukov's forces forced it to detrain at Łódź without even reaching its objective. After covering the 9th Army's retreat, it was forced to withdraw southwest toward the Warthe.[22]

Zhukov's advance to the Oder

Tree carving in Bielinek (Bellinchen), Pomerania, immediately east of the Oder. It reads, in Russian, "March 1945, Death to the Germans."

After encircling Poznań, the 1st Guards Tank Army advanced deep into the fortified region around the Obra River against patchy resistance from a variety of Volkssturm and Wehrmacht units. There was heavier resistance, however, on the approaches to the fortress of Küstrin.

The German reorganisation of command structure that resulted in the creation of Army Group Vistula was accompanied by the release of a few extra formations for the defense; the V SS Mountain Corps, with two reserve infantry divisions, was deployed along the Obra and the prewar border fortifications known as the Tierschtigel Riegel, while the Panzergrenadier-Division Kurmark was ordered to reinforce it.[30]

On 16 January 1945 Colonel Bogislaw von Bonin, the Chief of the Operational Branch of the Army General Staff (Generalstab des Heeres) gave Army Group A permission to retreat from Warsaw, overruling a direct order from Hitler for them to hold fast. Three days later von Bonin was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned first at Flossenbürg concentration camp and then Dachau concentration camp. The officer was eventually liberated along with other prisoners in South Tyrol by the US Army in May 1945.

The military historian Earl Ziemke described the advance thus:

On the 25th, Zhukov's main force passed Poznań heading due west towards Kuestrin, on the Oder forty miles east of Berlin. The path of the Soviet advance looked like the work of a gigantic snowplough, its point aimed on a line from Warsaw to Poznań, to Berlin. All of Army Group A was being caught up by the point and the left blade and thrown across the Oder. On the right the German had nothing except a skeleton army group that Hitler had created some days earlier and named Army Group Vistula.

— Earl Ziemke[31]

On 25 January, Hitler renamed three army groups. Army Group North became Army Group Courland; Army Group Centre became Army Group North and Army Group A became Army Group Centre.[32]

The 2nd Guards Tank and 5th Shock Armies reached the Oder almost unopposed; a unit of the 5th Shock Army crossed the river ice and took the town of Kienitz as early as 31 January.[33]

Stavka declared the operation complete on 2 February. Zhukov had initially hoped to advance directly on Berlin, as the German defences had largely collapsed. However the exposed northern flank of 1st Belorussian Front in Pomerania, along with a German counter-attack (Operation Solstice) against its spearheads, convinced the Soviet command that it was essential to clear German forces from Pomerania in the East Pomeranian Offensive before the Berlin offensive could proceed.

In July of 1944, the Soviet 8th Guards liberated Lublin, and after a brief skirmish with German forces outside the city, came upon the Majdanek concentration camp. Although the Soviets invited press from around the world to witness the horrors of the camp, war news overshadowed the event.

After being caught off guard at Majdanek, the Nazis realized that the Soviets would end up finding every camp within Eastern Europe (with all of the prisoners and guards still present) if something were not to be done. As a result, by mid January, the SS and Nazi-controlled police units had begun forcing thousands of camp prisoners from Poland, East Prussia, Silesia and Pomerania to walk westward away from the advancing Red Army. The death marches, which took place over hundreds of kilometers in sub-zero conditions without food and medicine, resulted in thousands of concentration camp prisoners and allied POWs dying en route. It is estimated that in March and April 1945 at least 250,000 men and women were marched on foot to the heartland of Germany and Austria sometimes for weeks at a time.[34][35]

On 27 January, troops from Konev's First Ukrainian Front (322nd Rifle Division, 60th Army) liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp. Despite attempts by retreating SS units to destroy parts of the camp, the Soviet forces still found graphic evidence of the Holocaust. The Soviets would also liberate camps such as Płaszów, Stutthof, and Ravensbrück.

In anticipation of the approaching Red Army, the retreating Wehrmacht left parts of the German territory largely abandoned. With widespread unchecked chaos erupting, numerous reports of looting and attacks against ethnic Germans emerged. Nazi propaganda had furthermore demonized the Soviet Army so much that most Germans attempted to run.[36] Millions of ethnic German refugees fled west to escape the inevitable persecutions, seeking relative safety in central or western Germany, or even in the custody of the American and British west of the Rhine.[37]

The Vistula–Oder Offensive was a major success for the Soviet military. Within a matter of days the forces involved had advanced hundreds of kilometers, taking much of Poland and striking deep within the pre-war borders of the Reich. The offensive broke the back of Army Group A, and much of Germany's remaining capacity for military resistance. However, the stubborn resistance of German forces in Silesia and Pomerania, as well as continuing fighting in East Prussia, meant that the final offensive towards Berlin was delayed by two months, by which time the Wehrmacht had once again built up a substantial force on this axis.

On 31 January, the Soviet offensive was voluntarily halted, though Berlin was undefended and only approximately 70 km (43 mi) away from the Soviet bridgeheads across the Oder river. After the war a debate raged, mainly between Vasily Chuikov and Georgy Zhukov whether it was wise to stop the offensive. Chuikov argued Berlin should have been taken then, while Zhukov defended the decision to stop.

The operation was followed by a period of several weeks of mopping-up and consolidation on the part of the Red Army, along with ongoing hard fighting in pockets in the north. On 16 April, the Red Army jumped off from lines on the Oder and Neisse Rivers, the opening phase of the Battle of Berlin, which proved to be the culminating offensive of the war on the Eastern Front. The relatively rapid progress of this new offensive toward the German heartland seems to illustrate the cumulative extent of the erosion of the Wehrmacht's capability to defend a broad front. Nevertheless, they remained dangerous opponents for some weeks longer, especially when allowed or forced to concentrate in limited areas.

• East Prussian Offensive, the parallel offensive in East Prussia
• Western Carpathian Offensive, the parallel offensive in Slovakia
• Operation Solstice, German counter-offensive in Pomerania
• East Pomeranian Offensive, the operation to clear the northern flank of 1st Belorussian Front
• Silesian Offensives, operations to clear the southern flank of 1st Ukrainian Front
• Battle of Berlin

Notes

Bibliography

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• Duffy, C. Red Storm on the Reich: The Soviet March on Germany, 1945 Routledge 1991 ISBN 0-415-22829-8
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