Excerpts from the AH.com thread “Was Order No 371 a War Crime?”
Weimarer Republik said:
On 4 June, as the Red Army prepared to invade the German Heimat for the first time, the Stavka of the Central Command issued a general order declaring the Schutzstaffel to be a criminal organisation and unlawful combatants. Henceforth, members of the SS, including the Waffen-SS, would be denied protection under the laws of war. Soldiers in SS uniforms would be denied quarter and subject to summary execution.
This was a dramatic change in military policy. For the previous five years, with the exception of reprisals ordered against units engaged in war crimes, the Soviets and Americans had treated the Wehrmacht and SS mostly the same. But now that the war was entering its final stage, the political and military leaders of international communism moved very swiftly to liquidate the enforcement arm of Nazism.
Documents declassified in the 1950s show that such a measure had been debated in the Soviet State Defence Committee and the American Revolutionary Military Council for years. It was not a purely military decision, as it is sometimes portrayed, but very clearly a policy promoted by civilian political leadership, especially from Browder’s office.
The liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau probably pushed things forward, as had the experience with both perfidy from the 28. SS-Grenadier-Divizion “Die Goten” during the occupation of East Prussia, and the experience of Werwolf terrorist actions behind the lines. Soldiers on the frontlines needed little inducement to carry it out. During the Brandenburg offensive, the order was enforced ruthlessly. For example, during the Battle of the Seelow Heights, when Comintern soldiers broke through on the way to encircling Berlin, no prisoners were taken from the XIII. SS-Armeekorps; all four divisions were liquidated after they were overrun.
There are no official statistics of how many members of the SS were liquidated under the order. But given the number of Waffen-SS units that were destroyed in the final offensives into Germany, it could be hundreds of thousands. Members of the Allgemeine-SS would be shot as partisans if found with firearms or anything classified as an explosive device (including a gasoline “Jerry can”). As criminal organizations, all of the members were to be rounded up and imprisoned by occupation forces.
Here in the Deutscher Bund the order is something of a sore spot. Except when the rare liberal administration is in power, our government constantly makes resolutions demanding the UN classify it as a crime against humanity, demands certain people be prosecuted for carrying it out, and other shenanigans. And even as someone who hates the DDVP, it’s hard not to see a parallel with the Commissar Order.
HectorValiente said:
Now I’m more of a South American theatre expert but I’ll weigh in here.
It was inspired in large part by the success of the “Order Number 313” which decreed that any member of the Guarda Verda who did not desert or surrender without resistance and disavow the Guard was to be shot. Even though the order was fake, it destroyed the morale of the Guard in South America and made them bleed out whole swathes of manpower. However it was felt that the SS was not going to fall for the same trick twice; so it had to be backed up by it actually being carried through.
As for the comparison to the commissar order; the commissar order in practice was that anyone deemed to be a true believer in Communism regardless of actual status as a political officer was to be killed upon identification. It was an order to make belief in an opposing worldview illegal on pain of death. The Commando Order similarly rendered anyone simply engaging in special forces activities subject to execution without trial. In contrast, Order 371 and 313 were very specifically targeted at those who refused to abandon specific uniforms and were given the option to desert if wanted.
The organizations in question were, from the ground up, designed to be the executioners and chief enforcers of fascist states and to do things not even the regular army could be entrusted to do. Baked into the very structure of the SS was the eradication and enslavement of entire faiths, ethnicities and the carrying out of Germany’s dreams of settler colonialism in eastern Europe and beyond. That to me, goes far beyond what a standard army can be excused for participating in and pushes them into the status of essentially a state sanctioned gang.
EmpireOfEndlessMonologues said:
From all my West German colleagues, I’ve noticed a pattern in how Order No. 371 is presented in general education: they are often unaware that as a campaign of revolutionary terror, the fear of it was more important than the actual execution.
It was well studied at Sandhurst and Saint-Cyr as a case study in breaking enemy morale. When they promulgated the order, they also dropped several thousand-million leaflets across Germany, especially in major population centres. Their underground networks in the Red Orchestra were instructed specifically to bring up the subject in social gatherings as part of the campaign to encourage defeatism. Since many SS were conscripts now, and the able-bodied population in Germany were going to be mobilized into ad hoc Volkssturm units, it encouraged desertion and surrender. The leaflets promised that men who deserted or gave up without a fight would be spared.
Punishment under the order is often haphazardly characterized as “summary judgment” which is a bit of an exaggeration. Men captured in Waffen-SS uniform or were believed to be officers were subject to drumhead courts-martial. These were not pleasant affairs, but the records of the 1st Byelorussian Front, which spearheaded the northern flank of the invasion of Germany show that execution was only handed out in about one third of such trials. The rest were sent to penal work battalions and processed in the post-war tribunals.
And with SS Einsatzgruppen doling out summary execution to “defeatists” it was already not a great morale situation.
The reality is that many units began to disintegrate even before the Red Army got to them. The enforcers of the Nazi regime began taking off their uniforms, throwing away the parephernalia of the SS, and deserting their posts. And the Red Army looked the other way. Because that’s what the leaflets and pirate radio broadcasts promised: put down your arms, leave your post and be spared. Even in the case of the XIII SS Army Corps, the majority were allowed to desert rather than be hanged as unlawful combatants.
Mekasutōmu said:
Like with Order 313, Order 371 was meant to induce fear to break the back of a paramilitary outfit that had increasingly come to dominate an enemy state. With the likes of Ferdinand Schörner trying to keep morale up through mass executions until retreat was deadlier than frontline service (it must be remembered than in his service as Field Marshal and then his brief stint as supreme commander of the Wehrmacht, “Bloody Ferdinand” executed more soldiers than the entirety of the United Nations throughout the entire war combined multiple times over!) and the Axis military increasingly comprised of children and the elderly; the morale situation was critical. A lot of the German soldiers pressed into the Waffen SS were boys from the Hitler Youth, and it was felt that impressing upon these boys the necessity of forsaking the third reich to survive would save more lives than continuing to treat the SS as just another branch of the German armed forces.
In essence, it gave the newly indoctrinated into the SS a choice. They could try to flee back to their homes in Germany and be murdered by Schörner’s lackeys, fight and die on the battlefield, or desert and find amnesty in the Comintern’s REVMIL forces who would provide sanctuary to those who abandoned their uniforms and came under the white flag. The SS die-hards would always choose the second option, nobody either among the Allies or the Comintern doubted that. But for those who had doubts, it was seen as a matter of offering only one path to survival in the hopes of providing the last mortal blow to their will to fight; surrender.
The Brandenburg Offensive (Operation Aurora)
When the summer Sun rose at 5:00 A.M. on Saturday 14 July 1945, millions of men from the Army of Work lept from their trenches, bayonets gripped with hardened hands. Tens of thousands of guns erupted along a front stretching from Stettin on the Baltic coast to Reichenberg in the Sudetenland. Their goal: tear down the Third Reich and entomb the Nazi leadership in Berlin.
The culmination of five years of bloody toil was finally at hand. Soldiers and volunteers from almost every member of the Communist International would play a part in the offensive. While the Western Allies pinned down large concentrations of German troops in defending the Low Countries and the Rhineland, the forces of the Comintern were pushing deep into the German heartland.
Overall command of Red Army forces for the operation was entrusted to Marshal Mikhail V. Frunze. His opponent would be Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, Hitler’s praetorian and now de facto leader of the Greater German Reich. With Hitler virtually convalescent due to his physician’s (mis)care, there would be little political meddling from above.
In the campaigns of spring and early summer, the Red Army had fought through Poland and the Balkans. The 2nd Ukrainian Front had smashed the Gothic Line and occupied Silesia in June. Advanced elements were probing second echelon defenses in occupied Bohemia.
Southeast, the 3rd Ukainian Front remained an army in being, holding down the sizeable Hungarian Army and German forces of Army Group J from its toehold in eastern Hungary. Their probing attacks misled Axis intelligence about events further south until it was too late.
The 4th Ukrainian Front, in cooperation with Yugoslav partisans under the communist-led Council of National Liberation, had launched a major offensive in May, retaking Belgrade and much of Serbia from Italian occupying forces. With promises of amnesty by Marshal Tito towards collaborator forces, the Italian position was in a state of total collapse.
Disposition of forces
Comintern forces in the Brandenburg Offensive consisted of four fronts, collected administratively under the Central European Theatre: the 1st Baltic, 1st Byelorussian, 2nd Byelorussian and 1st Ukrainian Fronts. A total of 2.9 million men would take part in the operation.
In the north, the 1st Baltic Front would break through German defensive works in western Pomerania, assisted by amphibious operations across the Stettin Lagoon. With fire support from the Soviet Baltic Fleet, the 1st Baltic Front would hold the northern flank of the operation, and penetrate as deep into central Germany as practical to disrupt the movement of reinforcements eastward.
1st Baltic would consequently be the smallest of the four, with proportionally fewer tanks and heavy armored fighting vehicles. American General Maurice Rose would be in overall command, with the amphibious operations commanded by a Marine, Lieutenant General Malcolm Howard*.
Once breakthrough could be achieved along the full frontage, the several cavalry-mechanised groups and the 9th Tank Army would advance rapidly, screened by the deployment of the 105th Guards Airborne division. The final operational goal would be the city of Hamburg, and the blocking of the evacuation of German occupying forces in Denmark.
Just south, the 1st Byelorussian Front would break through the heavier defensive positions in eastern Brandenburg. The front would make a sickle cut through Brandenburg, destroying armored formations and securing the investment of Berlin by linking up with 2nd Byelorussian west of Berlin. Forces would push westward rapidly to destroy German reinforcements on the march, with the goal of reaching Hanover by September.
The second half of the investment of Berlin would be mirrored by the 2nd Byelorussian Front, tasked with sweeping through southern Brandenburg. Secondary objectives were to encircle and destroy the 1st SS Panzer Army before it could reinforce Berlin proper and proceed to Hanover.
The 1st Ukrainian Front would guard the southern flank of the operation. Once achieving breakthrough into the German interior, 1st Ukrainian would cordon off the large concentration of German men, artillery and armor in Bohemia and wheel southward to Bavaria. Subsequent operations in Silesia and Yugoslavia would support this operational objective.
Strategy
With the Inter-Allied Council unable to achieve any agreement about occupation zones in Germany, the political consideration driving much of the operational planning for the summer offensives was to secure as much territory as possible for the post-war period. The Revolutionary Military Council deeply mistrusted Western Allied intentions with regards to Germany. Publicly, the Franco-British War Council had been opaque about post-war plans. But moles embedded within British intelligence had been able to discover a number of plans by the Cherwell Commission to territorially dismember Germany and completely deindustrialize the country.
Even the Soviet leadership were disgusted by such barbarism. General of the Army Zhukov remarked that “millions of Soviet soldiers did not die so that English pirates could cart away the wealth of the Ruhr.” Marshal Frunze stated unequivocally in a January meeting of the State Defense Committee that “such an assault on the German proletariat must be regarded as an act of war,” and must be resisted by the full might of the Red Army.
But no one was enthusiastic about a continuation war against the Western Allies. While it became clear with the disintegration of the French State and the rate of Allied progress on the Western Front would make a total liberation of Germany likely infeasible, securing the bulk of German territory and population was ambitious but still possible. The Franco-British may occupy the Ruhr and the Rhineland, but they could never command the loyalty of the working class there, and they would provide the political power to force the reunification of Germany into a socialist republic.
Operation Liebknicht, the late spring counteroffensive into Silesia, had set the ball rolling. To a certain extent, the Reich Main Security Office and the propaganda arms of the Nazi state could downplay or hide the enemy incursions into East Prussia. But the loss of the Ford Front industrial projects in Silesia had sent shockwaves through the German war economy. Over half of German coal liquefaction capacity was lost. Critical mining and industrial labor camps for the production of ball-bearings, rare earths and explosives were taken as well.
The advancing Soviet forces sent refugee waves westward into Germany. With this conduit, the National Committee for a Free Germany sent infiltrators and supplies to support resistance groups in the German heartland.
Rote Kappelle, the network of communist agitators and spies operating within Germany, had been laying the groundwork for defeatist actions for years now. The small core cadres of stay-behinds had been diligently grown since the Battle of Stalingrad. This dangerous, thankless work persisted even amidst the murderous attempts by the RHSA to stamp out dissent. With networks now spread among all major German industries as well as the masses of slave labor imported to the Reich, the Red Orchestra could with the right catalyst hobble the German war effort.
An unexpected boon came in January, as the Nazi program of Totaler Krieg was expanded. Workers in even the most critical of war industries were now pressed into the Volkssturm. The arms and ammunition were kept under the watchful eyes of SS commissars, but the program was all too honest. German workers were expected to die to the last man in defense of the Reich.
Rations which had once remained steady had fallen drastically. German workers had already given millions of their sons to the war effort for a regime that had never held them in much esteem, and now they were being asked to fall on their sword for Hitler’s pride. The morale situation on the home front had collapsed in the past three months, far faster than even the RHSA had anticipated. The implementation of Fordist production methods in the 30s may have strengthened the German war economy, but had cost the NSDAP what support it had among the artisanal skilled workers. Germany was a powder keg waiting for the right spark.
Stavka had predicted with confidence that the buildup of forces near the German heartland and the start of offensive operations would provoke a general withdrawal of German expeditionary forces to defend the heartland. As forces marshalled in Poland in June, Army Group B began withdrawing its forces from Hungary and Italian-occupied Yugoslavia. Forces supporting the French-state remnant and guarding the west embarked eastward, supported by Volkssturm levies. The die had been cast.
Countdown to D-Day
In the weeks before the offensive, the Red Army Air Forces stepped up bomber offensives into Germany. With the Luftwaffe shattered, tactical bombers and fighters reave across eastern Germany. Casualties to anti-aircraft artillery are high but sustainable. Luftwaffe forward air bases are suppressed in the initial waves. Fuel and ammunition stores are bombed with incendiaries. The centralized electrical grid is hit with chaff bombs, causing rolling blackouts in core German industries. Anything that moves by road, rail or canal is bombed, rocketed and strafed.
German soldiers on the march are easy prey to interdiction. The need for speed prevents easy movement in the short summer night, and in the day the green German formations practice poor camouflage discipline. Reinforcement of the front is slow and perilous as a result.
Leafleting campaigns continue to encourage surrender and defeatism. “Do not obey the SS gangsters, their time will come” states one. “German worker! Your liberation is at hand!” says another.
German frontline forces continued to dig-in deeper even as the bombing and shelling intensified. Heavy long-range bombardment by frontal artillery assets ground down forces at the front. Several feints and probing actions by special cadres kept German commanders off balance. It was not known when the attack would come, and several times forces had begun mobilizing only for no major attack to commence.
Aurora
The initial attacks began along the Baltic Sea in the north. Heralded by a thunder of naval and army artillery, Marines hit the lightly defended beaches on the western bank of the Stettin Lagoon. A rolling curtain of artillery fire shielded the initial attacks. As the Marines pressed inland, the Soviet 12th Shock Army hit German fortifications in a pre-dawn assault. By first light, the mines and barbed wire had been cleared, and the hardened Soviet riflemen engaged in close-quarters battle with the mostly Hitler Youth draftees of the 549th Volksgrenadier Division.
The boys of the 549th fought tenaciously, but were quickly overwhelmed by superior Soviet firepower. The haunting experience of fighting and killing teenage boys would be recounted in post-war Soviet novels such as The Binding of Isaac.
But with such overwhelming superiority in numbers, artillery and tanks by the Red Army, and the relative paucity of heavy anti-tank guns on the German, the incomplete defensive positions could not hold for long. Close support by T-44 tanks ensured that many of the German reinforcements succumbed to tank shock. The effective infantry-tank cooperation suppressed the effectiveness of the numerous panzerfaust weapons. Soviet light and medium tanks would soon be able to break into the operational rear.
Meanwhile, the forward deployed airborne troops secured bridges and strongpoints, slowing the movement of reinforcements from the rear. In spite of tales of Communist barbarism, morale was brittle. Surrenders at the first sign of the enemy had been unthinkable mere months ago. They now occurred regularly.
In the rapid advance through the coastal villages, the Red Army encountered a frightened civilian populace. Heaps of SS uniforms and Nazi regalia were left discarded in town squares. Sometimes the burgers ratted out the men of the SS who tried to hide, especially those who’d been zealous in the application of Oberbefehlshaber des Heeres Schörner’s methods.
Four hundred kilometres to the south, the 1st Ukrainian Front began its assault on the southern end of the Hitler Line. Army Group Centre was better entrenched here, and the terrain better favored the defender. But in the past three weeks, the Twelfth SS-Army had been shifted northwards to defend Berlin itself, and the Eighth Panzer Army that was to replace them had been arriving in a trickle from Bohemia.
Still, on the whole the German position was more robust. The batteries of 8.8 cm Pak 43 guns available to Obergruppenführer Felix Steiner have been concentrated in major strong points in towns and crossroads. Covered by earthworks, concrete bunkers, and guarded by infantry guns and lighter anti-tank units, these fortresses would be a tough nut to crack. Still, Steiner had perhaps 240,000 battle ready men, four hundred tanks and three thousand guns to cover a ninety-four kilometer frontage.
The 1st Ukrainian Front would hammer Steiner with ten thousand artillery pieces, two thousand tanks, and the full might of the 8th Air Army. A total of nearly 700,000 men would be involved in this part of the operation.
The attack came sooner than expected. German strongpoints were reduced with a furious expenditure of bombs and artillery shells. The mechanized infantry at the vanguard probed and infiltrated the weak points. Once the initial cracks in the defensive lines were opened and secured by pioneers, the 9th Tank Army was able to bypass the major strong points and begin operational encirclements.
The Volkssturm levies and third-rate Wehrmacht divisions in the second and third defense echelons did not fight as tenaciously as the SS-men in the first echelon. The 12th SS Panzer Division “Hitlerjugend” counterattacked as ordered. But as they crashed into the spearheads of the 9th Tank Army, they too began to wither under aerial attack. Well prepared for their riposte, the American tankers turn the clash outside of Bautzen into a bloodbath. The fields outside the town are littered with the burning wrecks of Jaguar tanks.
Three days after the assaults began at Stettin and Reichenburg, the 1st and 2nd Byelorussian Fronts began the investment of Berlin. The fighting is intense all along the front, but the overwhelming Comintern superiority in numbers and firepower mean the front cannot hold for long. It does not matter how many men Commander-In-Chief Schörner has shot for “cowardice”, the lines begin to break.
The Soviet spearhead, the 62nd Army, advances inexorably, encountering the fiercest resistance at the Seelow Heights. Additional forces from the Polish 2nd Army and the Soviet 41st Army arrived a day later to continue the assault. The progress is slow over the flooded lowlands, but the opening of the reservoir can only work once. As the mud dries in the summer heat, progress picks up.
The 2nd Detachment of the Chinese New Fourth Army, augmented with the Nisei 100th Infantry Regiment, finished the assault on the morning of 20th July, taking General Georg-Wilhelm Postel’s command post west of the town of Seelow, along with the general and his staff.
Major General Chen Geng had come to the Soviet Union with a token force as a symbol of Comintern unity. But with grit and cunning, he’d come to Seelow a conquering hero, gazing at the outskirts of Berlin in the distance.
Encircling the Mark of Brandenburg
Once German forces were unrooted from their defensive positions, they were now bypassed. The 1st and 2nd Byelorussian Fronts began their sickle-cuts around the city of Berlin, isolating much of the province from the rest of Germany. The tank armies at the vanguard advanced as fast as logistics would feasibly allow, pushing forward to disrupt the arrival of reinforcements and secure territory quickly.
Göring would not give in so easily. Undaunted by the total collapse of forward positions, the Reichsmarschall continued to give orders for vigorous counterattacks even as he and the rest of the Nazi leadership sheltered in Hitler’s Führerbunker. Schörner obeyed the orders of the few men above him without question. As the Soviet and American tanks pushed deeper into Germany, he ordered the First Panzer Army and detached elements of the Eleventh Army to attack southeast from Wittstock, and hit the 2nd Guards Tank Army on its flank near the town of Orianberg, about sixty kilometres north of Berlin.
Sixth Army, with its collection of depleted infantry divisions augmented by heavy tank battalions, would attempt to drive between the 1st Baltic and 1st Byelorussian Fronts and make time for forces to move to defend Berlin.
Army Detachment Dietrich would counterattack north from near Dresden. With the largest remaining concentration of heavy tanks, this collection of SS and Wehrmacht divisions would attempt to chop off the 2nd Byelorussian Front’s spearheads near Luckau.
Despite their misgivings, the commanders began their counterattacks on 20 July. Well telegraphed by aerial reconnaissance, short on food, fuel and ammunition, they were an exercise in vanity. Tanks and trooper carriers endured a withering hail of bombs and rockets from the Red Army Air Force. Many of the heavier tanks never made it into battle from fuel shortage or breakdowns. The tanks that did make it were heavily outnumbered, and faced a well-positioned screen of infantry anti-tank units as well as tank destroyers.
In the end, no amount of harsh discipline could overcome the material reality. Officers and young boys of the Volkssturm shot “for cowardice” may have ultimately backfired in upholding morale. The sight of the mighty heavy tanks from the Tigers to the even more outlandishly large vehicles such as the Smilodon left burning or abandoned further broke what hope the soldiery had remaining.
While these bloody counter attacks caused many casualties in the Red Army, they proved to be only speed bumps in operational tempo. As soldiers began to take their chances with the enemy rather than die for the ungrateful, desertions and surrenders increased.
Just after noon on 25 July 1945, the leading elements of the 2nd Guards Tank Army linked up with the 5th Guards Tank Army in the town of Brandenberg an der Havel, seventy kilometres west of Berlin.
The bulk of four German armies (First, Fourth, Ninth, Twelfth SS) are now trapped in two cauldrons. The smaller, wrapped tightly around the city of Berlin itself. The larger comprised much of the southern half of the Mark of Brandenburg itself, hemmed between the Lusatian Neisse and the Elbe River.
Deep Operations
300,000 German soldiers and Ostruppen are now trapped in Brandenburg Cauldron. A further eighty thousand, half of them Volkssturm, are invested in Berlin itself. Attempts to relieve both pockets begin immediately. Panzer Detachment Peiper, a corps sized task force consisting of SS and Wehrmacht units rushed from the Western Front has only just detrained in Leipzig on the 25th when its commander, Brigadeführer Joachim Peiper, receives the OKW’s urgent order to relieve the cauldron.
His troops have barely enough time for a hot meal before they begin the march. But by the time he reaches the starting point for the hasty offensive plan, Peiper finds it already occupied by a Mexican motorized rifle division, the 1st Infantry Division Magonista. The depth and strength of the cordon continues to grow, and the abortive attack fails.
Stavka is content to reduce these pockets carefully. Once lines of communication are secured, the offensives continue westward. Divisions moving eastward run into advancing Red Army forces piecemeal. By 30 July, most of the land east of the Elbe River had been secured. The noose is tightening around Berlin with every minute.
Throughout these body blows, the state apparatus of the Greater German Reich had remained intact. But on the morning of the 30th, when the Gauleiter of Hamburg issued a proclamation ordering the city’s Volkssturm to mobilise and defend the Reich to the last man, woman and child, the first spark flew.
Dockworkers and machinists attached to the Ford Front’s u-boat facilities reported to their units and received their arms and ammunition. The uprising began soon after, as the armed workers quickly overwhelmed the small police detachments. Organized by communist militants, the uprising quickly spread through the city. By the evening, the revolutionaries had secured most of the major governmental buildings as well as the local Nazi Party headquarters.
Wehrmacht units in the region quickly organized to suppress the uprising. The old men did not have the stomach for it. In those crucial early hours, they failed to act. Some even broke ranks and joined the revolutionaries, convinced with good reason that the war was lost.
The Waffen-SS were not so conflicted. Most of their ranks had been conscripted straight from the Hitler Youth. Counterattacks were organized for the next morning. But by then it was perhaps too late. The powderkeg had already been lit, and the pirate radio broadcasts had encouraged sympathy actions elsewhere.
I’m Not Dying For These Bastards
If there was one thing that motivated the revolutionaries of 30 July 1945, it was a sober belief that the war was lost and there was no sense in dying for those jumped up shits in the NSDAP party uniforms. The communist agitators had been the core militants that set the ball rolling, but it had been the masses of workers who’d kept their head downs for the past decade and went with the flow of history that made it happen.
The strikes and armed uprisings spread through most of the towns and cities of Germany, concentrated most heavily in the Ruhr, northern Bavaria and eastern Austria. These movements quickly linked up with the slave workers who’d been imported by the millions to feed the German war machine.
Some of them had been prisoners of war. Others veterans from a dozen armies in Eastern Europe. They’d been worked in starvation conditions and replaced steadily with new trainloads when they perished from starvation or pestilence. And while the German strikers had major reservations about actually shooting their fellow Germans, the men and women from the slave labor units had no such reservations.
Many died in the first week of the uprising. But they secured food and weapons through cautious cooperation with German communist militants, and took their revenge on the SS overseers.
The cost in human life will never be fully known. The Nazi security state tried to suppress the strikes by any means necessary. But events were already far out of anyone’s control. The Nazi war economy ground to a halt. The bombs continued to fall. The frontline forces continued to fight on. But they did so mortally wounded.
In the West, spurred on by a fear that these events could spread out of control, Franco-British Forces began their assault on the remnants of the traitor French and German forces that occupied Belgium and northeastern France. German military resistance would rapidly crumble. The war entered its final phase, as the Western Allies and the Reds raced to secure as much of Germany as possible.
Götterdämmerung
The noose wrapped around Berlin slowly tightened. Troops of the Red Army advanced slowly and methodically, shielded by relentless curtains of artillery fire. The experience of block by block, house by house fighting at Kiev, Smolensk, and Stalingrad had prepared the Red Army well, but the process could not be rushed.
The once pristine streets of Germany’s capital had been filled with rubble. Generaloberst Gotthard Heinrici, one of the Heer’s leading defense experts, had been given command of the Berlin defense zone. With his initial plans and counterattacks routed, Heinrici lobbied to regroup and prevent further exploitation, hoping that a separate peace in the west would allow a rebuilding of forces and counteroffensive to expel the Soviet and American occupiers in the winter.
Schörner had him dismissed as a defeatist for this, and he only barely escaped court-martial. During the chaos as SS-Oberst-Gruppenführer Wilhelm Bittrich assumed command, the garrison of the city was left to its own devices, with only the occasional meddling coming down from Goebbels. Generalleutnant Rudolf Sieckenius had taken command of the garrison on 27 July after his predecessor, General der Infanterie Joachim von Kortzfleisch, had been grievously wounded by shell splinters.
Sieckenius followed his orders to the letter, and gave ground as slowly as he could. But ammunition was short, as was fuel for the few armored fighting vehicles available. Rather than lose them entirely, Sieckenius transformed the handful of Panzer 50s into anti-tank pillboxes at key crossroads.
Sieckenius adopted, with mixed success, Soviet General Chuikov’s tactic of “hugging the enemy” to minimize his artillery advantage. The trained troops of the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS could manage such a harrowing tactic, but the Volkssturm often broke under the pressure.
The 3rd Guards Army, commanded by General Vasily Chuikov, spearheaded the advance through the city of Berlin. With corps from the Soviet Union, America, and IVA allies, 3rd Guards had been chosen deliberately for this symbolism.
General Chen’s detachment advanced steadily through the suburbs on centre-left of 3rd Guards’ line of advance. Through careful use of small unit tactics and unashamed use of corps and army level artillery assets, Chen and his WFRA liaison officer Acting Lt. Colonel Young-Oak Kim had kept casualties low while keeping pace with the advance. Kim’s organizational skills shone through, finishing most planned attacks in daylight and ensuring troops remained vigilant and rested for the next day’s operations.
As the Red Army advanced, the men penned in Hitler’s bunker stewed impotently. Göring would allow no talk of surrender, especially during Hitler’s few appearances. Nor would he tolerate Goebbels’ impotent talk of dying by his own hand. The arguments became more fierce, especially after Himmler’s men returned on the 30th empty handed. Entreaties to a separate peace with the West were rejected out of hand.
A brief cease-fire began at 0030 on 1 August, as a delegation led by General Wilhelm Krebs took an offer of armistice to the headquarters of 3rd Guards Army. As it so happened, Frunze and his entourage were present for the brief meeting. After a few pleasantries and reminisces of their work together when the Weimar Republic had conducted clandestine military cooperation with the Soviet Union in defiance of the Versailles Treaty, Krebs got down to brass tacks.
Carrying a sealed order from Göring, Krebs stated he was authorized to explore what terms would be amenable for the capitulation of the Greater German Reich. Frunze replied, “No terms. You will surrender.”
By the time Krebs returned to the Führerbunker, Göring had already made his escape. The daring test pilot Hanna Reitsch had landed on a makeshift airfield in downtown Berlin. Göring and his aide-de-camp quickly embarked. Evading anti-aircraft artillery, Reitsch flew westward beyond the front lines of the 1st Byelorussian Front.
Göring relocated the Reich government to the Adlerhorst (Eagle’s Nest) bunker complex in rural Hesse. Taking the title of Reichsprotektor, Göring had efficiently and neatly deposed Hitler and all of his rivals to power in the final days of the war. His firm show of leadership quelled talk of surrender and improved flagging morale in the West.
But for the armies in the direct path of the Red Army’s advance, it had the opposite effect, especially in Berlin. Away from the RHSA Göring had usurped from Himmler’s control, the troops in the East felt abandoned and betrayed by both Hitler and Göring. Hitler, it became clear, had lost his nerve and now his treacherous subordinates struggled over the scrapheap that was Germany.
At 1445, on Sunday 12 August 1945, troops of the 3rd Guards Army raised the crimson banner of the Communist International atop the Reichstag. Within hours, the garrison of Berlin surrendered. General Krebs and a small armed guard led Hitler, who was barely aware of his surroundings, out of the bunker under a white flag. Krebs delivered Hitler into the custody of the 150th Rifle Division, thwarting a plot by Goebbels to martyr him for the National Socialist cause.
The Anticlimax
Any sane man in the German government knew that the war was over. The Red Army continued to advance on all fronts. Operation Spartakus, the planned invasion of Fascist Italy, was set to begin on 30 August. Supporting operations by the 2nd Ukrainian Front were pushing into occupied Bohemia and Moravia, and planned to link up with 1st Ukrainian in Bavaria. The 1st Baltic Front continued to race through the lightly defended Baltic coast, and threatened to link up with the revolutionaries in Kiel and Hamburg. Even with the troops evacuating Denmark assisting, the German defenders would still be outnumbered and outgunned. And with the cauldrons in Brandenburg now liquidated, resulting in the death or capture of over three hundred thousand of Germany’s best troops, the 1st and 2nd Byelorussian Fronts were preparing to push westward into Central Germany.
The west was beginning to collapse as well. Even the unwieldy army of the Western Allies, which outside of the small core of mostly British mechanized troops advanced at the speed of horse-drawn carts, was racing towards the Ruhr as fast as their legs could carry them. The German state continued to dissolve to revolution out from under Göring’s feet. The war would be over soon, but the Reichsprotektor ensured it wouldn't end before many thousands more died.