The Road to Berlin (85 page)

On 4 November lead tanks of 4th Guards Mechanized Corps reached the southern and eastern suburbs of Budapest, but as the tank units waited for the Soviet infantry to catch up with them the chance to break into the Hungarian capital slipped away. Worse still, their right flank now lay open to German attack and the Soviet command had to add this danger to the risks of assaulting Budapest on an extremely narrow front. Though Shumilov’s 7th Guards Army took Szolnok and Czegled, the area to the north was still in German hands and here a powerful armoured force was assembling, threatening the Soviet flank. Repeated tank engagements were being fought in the heavy rain and amidst the flooded fields north of the Szolnok–Czegled–Budapest highway, but the German armour was not beaten back. On 4 November the
Stavka
signalled to Malinovskii that ‘an attack on Budapest along a narrow front with only two mechanized corps together with an insignificant body of infantry can lead to unjustified losses and expose the troops operating along this axis to the danger of an enemy blow against their flanks from the north-east’. The
Stavka
signal suggested expanding the Soviet attack by pushing forward the right-flank armies—7th Guards, 53rd, 27th and 40th Armies—and mounting an attack from the north and north-east in conjunction with one launched from 46th Army on the left. Pliev was therefore ordered ‘not later than 7.11.44’ to force the Tisza and slice the German units away from the river. The new Soviet plan involved one more frontal attack with the object of cutting up the German formations to the east of Budapest, outflanking the city from the north and then assaulting it from three directions, the north, the north-east and the south.

The second Soviet bid for Budapest began on 11 November and lasted for sixteen days. It brought the capture by Pliev’s columns of Miskolcz, thus snapping the link between Hungary and Slovakia, but it failed to bring the fall of Budapest. Malinovskii’s prediction proved to be accurate. Stalin had won his race for five days, but in so doing he lost five months. Hungary was fearfully ravaged and the twin cities of Buda and Pest subjected to a horrible fate, seared by fire and bombardment, turned into a nightmarish scene of killing, looting, murder and rape. For Stalin, Budapest became so sensitive a topic that he shunned any further mention of it in his telephonic visitations upon his commanders.

In the autumn of 1944 the thoughts of most men within the Allied and the Axis camps alike turned increasingly to the prospect of the war coming to an end. This was reflected in the Soviet Union by small but significant hints of better things to come and a general expectation of kindlier policies once the present rigours were done; while the Nazi leadership, thrown deeper into its own
chaos, threw up Himmler as its latest warlord and stepped up draconian measures of mobilization which brought ‘the new slave warfare’ to the Eastern Front, already surfeited with horrors.

The frenzied application of Hitler’s maniac dictum of ‘the last man and the last round’ gave it one final, fearful dimension and provided the human grist for Himmler’s military mill. Himmler’s power seemed to mushroom almost endlessly in the wake of the 20 July bomb plot; in addition to being head of the
SS
, the Secret Police and the state police, supervisor of the Nazi racial policy as ‘Reichskommissar for the Strengthening of Germanism’, overlord of important sections of the armaments industry (including the ‘revenge weapons’) and commander of thirty-eight
Waffen SS
divisions, he was now commander-in-chief of the ‘Replacement Army’. Under orders from Hitler to form fifteen new divisions, Himmler seized the chance to assemble a new army in the image of a ‘people’s army’, officered by Nazis and stiffened with the Nazi version of the Soviet commissar, the National–Socialist
‘Führungs-Offizier’
, in fresh formations boasting their origin in ‘the people’,
Volksgrenadiere
in the van, to wage what Himmler himself called ‘the sacred war of the people’. But to be forced into waging it, ‘the people’ were put in front of summary court-martial. The
Wehrmacht
watched for any sign of wavering; to encourage that last-ditch resistance, trees and bridges were turned into wayside gallows with their complement of corpses hung with warning signs that as deserters they had suffered Himmler’s justice. The ‘real swine’, however, and the true object of Himmler’s hatred, were ‘the people who belong to the officers’ clique’ and these men Himmler was determined to break.

For this last-ditch defence Himmler drew upon Soviet experience, extolling Soviet methods and singling out the defence of Leningrad as a model that his officers should study and emulate. The search for more men also brought about a spectacular volte-face on Himmler’s part—a ‘reconciliation’ with Vlasov, whom he had hitherto damned as a ‘hired Bolshevik butcher’, refusing to recognize the ‘Russian liberation movement’ that sprouted under the patronage of the
Wehrmacht
. All this changed on 16 September 1944, when Vlasov and Himmler met: the date (and the significant mix-up over press releases) suggest that Himmler had finally despaired of the outcome of the secret negotiations he had set afoot with the Russians in Stockholm, tenuous contacts which had been maintained since the middle of 1943 but which towards the end of September 1944 came to a dead end. Dr Peter Kleist’s return to Berlin from Stockholm on 21 September signalled the final collapse of this precarious and preposterous venture. Himmler and Vlasov met at Rastenburg, Himmler’s
HQ
. The
Wehrmacht
officers who supported Vlasov and his cause thought the decisive hour had struck, for with Himmler in command of the ‘Replacement Army’ there seemed a greater chance of forming and fielding large-size units composed of the Soviet
PW
s in German hands. Much depended, therefore, on Vlasov making his case to Himmler. On the surface, the meeting was a success, with Himmler weeping into his beer about his unfortunate errors in believing in
‘Untermensch
theories’: the
Ostpolitik
must go into reverse and provide the basis for a political and psychological onslaught against Stalin and his system. Vlasov was to get ten divisions and enjoy ‘the rights of an ally’; Himmler even proposed the rank of ‘Head of Government’ for Vlasov, though the latter tactfully declined. For a brief moment Vlasov enjoyed the status of a ‘wonder weapon’ in his own right, but the glitter was soon gone. Himmler suddenly revised his figure of ‘ten divisions’ to three; Keitel and Jodl at the
OKW
firmly squashed talk of ‘building up Vlasov’, Rosenberg was furious at the Himmler-Vlasov compact and his
Ostministerium
vigorously pressed the claims of other national minorities to block Vlasov’s ‘Great Russian chauvinism’. The new ‘wonder weapon’ flopped almost from the start.

Between them, Himmler and Goebbels (recently nominated the ‘Reich Plenipotentiary for Total War’) raised half a million men and dispatched them, half-trained and ill-equipped, to the front; in the rear Goebbels filled up the barracks, and just as fast Himmler emptied them. At first Goebbels thought in terms of a grand alliance between Himmler and himself—the army for Himmler, the civilian direction of the whole war effort for Goebbels—but Martin Bormann was not prepared to stand idly by while Himmler took over the
Reich
. Over the creation of the
Volkssturm
, the local defence force or ‘home guard’ formally established on 18 October, Bormann ensured that the party organization retained a tight grip, thus diminishing Himmler’s prerogatives as head of the Replacement Army; the
Volkssturm
emerged as a
levée en masse
conducted under the aegis of the
Gauleiters
—and Bormann controlled the
Gauleiters
. To bypass this barrier to his authority, Himmler inevitably channelled as many men as possible into the
Waffen SS
, the military empire which was closed to the intrusions of Bormann and his satraps; of the fourteen new
SS
divisions being formed, only two—
SS Götz von Berlichingen
and
SS Horst Wessel
—were truly German and therefore even faintly Nordic, while seven drew their recruits from south-eastern Europe. Vlasov’s prisoner-legions never materialized. Himmler coveted the mass of deserters for himself and drew Latvian, Estonian, Ukrainian and White Russian units into the
Waffen SS
, which already enclosed special brigades of Turkomen and Caucasian prisoners or deserters. The
Wehrmacht
refused to hand over its own special Cossack divisions to this phantom army for ‘Russian liberation’; General Köstring, commander of the
Wehrmacht’s
own ‘Volunteer Formations’—the
Osttruppen
—drawn from Russian prisoners and deserters, refused to have anything to do with Vlasov and a contrived meeting in Prague in November 1944 proved to be extremely ‘uncordial’, barely preserving basic civilities. The occasion of this fleeting Köstring–Vlasov meeting was provided by the Prague congress, the scene of some elaborate ceremonial and junketing, but Vlasov was unable to offer much more than a congratulatory telegram from Himmler. The Russian civilian labourers, the
Ostarbeiter
, for whom Vlasov had pleaded, were not represented nor were their slave-labour conditions improving in any way, though Himmler promised not only this but their eventual freedom, while on the German side there were some studied absences.

The manifesto of the ‘Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia’, read amidst an elaborate ceremony on the afternoon of 14 November in the Spanish Hall of the Hradcin in Prague, at long last legitimized the ‘liberation movement’ and made it clear that this was no mere collection of Quislings. The document made no mention of national socialism and implicitly rejected the Nazi system. But equally, without the bayonets to back it up and relying as it did on the power of a regime dedicated to a stupefyingly inhuman
Ostpolitik
, the manifesto remained a collection of phrases and finally transformed political farce into personal tragedy. Himmler’s opportunist support for Vlasov, weak though it was, proved to be the kiss of death. Rosenberg counter-attacked fiercely, denouncing Vlasov’s plan as ‘a Great Russian dictatorship’ full of ‘subversive intentions’. In agreeing with Vlasov on one cardinal point, that the ‘liberation movement’ needed a ‘unified command’, Rosenberg also uncovered the fatal weakness in Vlasov’s whole position: ‘such unity could be secured only through the German High Command’. It was also only through the co-operation of the high command that Vlasov could organize any Russian fighting units, and this proved to be difficult.

The first two divisions, the 600th and the 650th, were to be raised at Münsingen and Heuberg, but the
Wehrmacht
command refused to part with its best surviving Russian troops, preferring to transfer only the remnants of mangled units—
SS Sigling
with its Russian troops battered in France, and the men of the ‘Kaminsky Brigade’ presently under Belai, a former Red Army lieutenant (Kaminsky himself having been shot for his ferocity and insubordination in the Warsaw rising, justice and discretion delivered by the
SS
itself in one blow suitably faked as a Polish ambush—a bullet-ridden car and a liberal application of animal blood—to conceal the truth from Kaminsky’s officers). Vlasov finally appointed the former Soviet colonel Bunyachenko, a divisional commander in the Far East in 1939 and subsequently a staff officer with Timoshenko, as the new commander of 600th Division with the rank of major-general. Under Bunyachenko, who fought for every man and scrap of equipment, the division began to take shape. But the case for the Vlasov ‘wonder weapon’ rested not on one or even two divisions, but on the massive psychological impact that a large Russian-manned army led by Vlasov might have (indeed, in the opinion of Vlasov’s German protagonists, must have) on the Soviet armed forces and their will to fight. Questionable though that assumption was, with the Red Army scenting victory Vlasov’s droplets meant nothing in the whole tide flooding up to Germany’s eastern frontiers.

Whatever the German fantasies about the state of Soviet morale, the Soviet leadership responded to the prevailing mood in the Soviet Union by adopting a ‘carrot-and-stick’ policy: a certain buoyancy was maintained by encouraging the belief in far-reaching post-war changes, but already certain steps were being taken to produce an ideological tightening-up. The huge bout of officially encouraged patriotism had gone far enough and now the Party embodying the Party ‘line’ was about to make its presence felt once again. Amidst the escapism of popular
songs and sentimental plays, or the sensational success of a Deanna Durbin film shown along with other American films, the Party journal
Bolshevik
in October sounded a warning against these ‘bourgeois’ tendencies: ‘light comedies and other forms of thoughtless entertainment’ would not be allowed to predominate at the expense of ‘big and serious subjects’ in literature and the arts. The Communist Party, however, had first to attend to the strains which three years of war imposed upon it. The demands of the front and the impact of the German occupation wrought havoc with the civilian party organizations, the strength of which fell from some three and a half million to just under two million during the first six months of the war, a declining curve which did not show signs of recovery until 1943. At the same time the armed forces, the Red Army above all, drew in a mass of Communist Party members and candidate members. Slightly more than half—56 per cent—of the entire strength of the Communist Party was in uniform by the end of 1943. In 1944 the pace of this expansion had begun to slacken, but between January and August 1944 party organizations in the Red Army admitted 460,780 full members and accepted 557,590 candidate members. The pace of this admission was accelerated by the 1941 decrees admitting Soviet servicemen who had distinguished themselves in action to full membership after only three months as candidate members, but there was also the heavy casualty rate among party members to offset this. On 14 October 1944 the Central Commission turned its attention to party admission for ‘the best Soviet servicemen’, at a time when the Red Army mustered 1,810,000 full members and 965,930 candidate members: two thirds of the party members (and an even greater proportion of candidate members) were on active service with fronts and armies. In sum, for three years and two months of war the grand total of admissions to the party organizations in the Red Army amounted to 1,802,410 full members and 3,196,580 candidate members (four-fifths with fighting formations).