put it, ‘by this time Hitler had started to issue orders which were clearly insane’; they were ‘pathologically self-destructive’, and their only result could be ‘glorious’ death.25
On 19 June, the complete failure of von dem Bach’s anti-partisan warfare in Byelorussia was made abundantly clear. Despite being hunted down for thirty months, and despite at that very moment enduring the brutality of his Operation ‘Kormoran’ anti-bandit sweep, the partisans detonated over 10,000 explosives in a massive coordinated action which paralyzed communication routes at the rear of Army Group Centre. Von dem Bach was shaken, and suspected that a Russian invasion was imminent. He was right. On 22 June the Soviets launched probing attacks to determine German strength along the front line, while engineering teams worked through the night clearing paths across the massive minefields in front of the German positions.
Many of the Germans did not know it, but that night was to be their last moment of calm. Some suspected that the Soviets might attack the next day – the third anniversary of Barbarossa. The atmosphere was tense. They sat in their grass-lined foxholes or prefabricated steel pillboxes, or in their bunkers furnished with stoves and beds and samovars, and lit fires to try to keep the infernal mosquitoes and midges at bay. Hot food, tinned liver and blood sausage with Schmalzbrot was washed down with tea, ersatz coffee or schnapps. Some read letters from home by the light of their Hindenburg candles; officers sat in more luxurious bunkers and stonewall shelters insulated with navy-blue overcoats stripped from the enemy dead.26 Some sang songs to the accompaniment of harmonicas, smoked and drank whatever alcohol they could get. The smell of unwashed woollen uniforms, heavy leather equipment, grease and oil filled the air. Many of the infantrymen thought ‘of wives and children, of mothers and fathers’, and of the bodies of their fallen comrades ‘lying still and cold’ beneath their birch crosses. Some read the Bible. Many still hoped that the real offensive would break out further south, and that they would somehow be spared. But even those who feared the worst had absolutely no idea of the massive scale of the attack they were about to face. Very few of the Germans on the front line in Byelorussia that night ever made it home.
Just across from them, a staggering 2.4 million Soviet soldiers were preparing for battle. The front-line troops were told about the attack at the last possible moment, during the obligatory evening Party and Komsomol meetings. So careful had the deception been that most were surprised to learn that they were going on the offensive in the morning, but morale was extremely high, and when they heard they cheered and sang and shouted slogans against the Germans. This was the anniversary of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, and it was time for revenge. Whatever happened from now on, they were told, it was an honour to die in battle. The crimes of the German invaders had been seen by all of them – the burned villages, the dead women and children – now it was time to seize the moment and fight. Many sensed that they were to be part of a decisive moment in history. As one soldier put it, ‘It was better to fight than to sit around in the trenches – the mood was electrified.’27
The Great Offensive
At exactly 0500 hours on the foggy morning of 23 June 1944 General Ivan Bagramyan gave the order to begin. Suddenly the mist was ripped by the sound of fire. The Germans, having just washed and shaved in the early-morning light, didn’t know what hit them. The concentration and magnitude of the opening barrage were overwhelming, as thousands of shells exploded and pounded and shook the earth around them. The noise was deafening, the vibrations of the ground like a series of earthquakes, an attack of ‘unprecedented ferocity’ in which ‘the air was thick and the light was blocked out by smoke and debris’, and a ‘whirlwind of iron and lead’ howled, ‘slicing through anything it hit’. The first round penetrated six kilometres into the German lines, crushing the forward trenches; then came rolling or double rolling barrages by hundreds of multiple-rocket launchers. Aircraft blackened the sky, pounding the German lines with rockets and bombs. Veniamin Fyodorov, a twenty-year-old soldier with the Soviet 77th Guards infantry regiment, watched the immense show of strength in awe: ‘When you look ahead, you see bits of earth flying up into the air and you see explosions. As if you light a match. Flashes, flashes.’ For the German soldiers it was hell: ‘We threw ourselves into the deepest trenches. Earth and shrapnel struck our steel helmets.’ German artillerymen mounted a feeble counter-attack, but the Russians targeted them with long-range artillery and blasted them to a pulp. A Russian signalman reported that ‘the whole line was burning from the shell bursts, almost all positions were seen to be blazing’.
With the ‘monstrous hurrah!’ characteristic of the Soviet infantry, the Russian soldiers swarmed forward in their thousands, fourteen armies in all, with over a thousand infantrymen per kilometre of front. ‘It was a sea of brown uniforms, our machine guns and explosive shells did no good, the Russians pressed forward, apparently oblivious to their losses.’ The ‘crazy attacks’ and wild choir of Russian ‘hurrahs’ struck terror in the Germans. Gone were the massed Soviet charges of Barbarossa days: a German 9th Army report described these new waves as intelligent, with ‘concentrated groups of infantry supported by highly concentrated and well-controlled fire from heavy weapons’. 1,700,000 combat and support troops were ready to push into the breach. After them came the T-34s and other tanks – along the four Soviet fronts an astounding 5,200 tanks and self-propelled guns had been prepared. There were 5,300 Soviet aircraft ready to pound the German lines. Then came ‘the cries of the wounded, of the agonized dying, shrieking as they stare at a part of their body reduced to pulp, the cries of men touched by the shock of battle’.28 Army Group Centre’s War Diary reported in panic that ‘the major attack by the enemy north-west of Vitebsk has taken the German command completely by surprise’.
The Germans in and around Vitebsk were in shock, and the 53rd Corps was barely able to hang on. After only one day of fighting Colonel General Georg-Hans Reinhardt, leader of the 3rd Panzer Army, proposed withdrawing, but Busch retorted that Hitler had ordered the city to be held at all costs. By the third day the Soviets had encircled the beleaguered men.
Reinhardt, who was soon to fight at Warsaw, was utterly shocked when he saw the Soviets bearing down on Vitebsk. The sheer number of men, tanks and planes was simply overwhelming. Reinhardt realized that the situation was hopeless, and begged Busch to ask Hitler for permission to fall back to the ‘Tiger Line’ east of Minsk. Hitler angrily refused. Within hours entire formations, including the 6th Corps’ 299th and 197th Infantry Divisions, had simply ceased to exist. By evening two more German divisions were encircled, and another two were about to be. Major General Gollwitzer was trapped in the pocket, and pleaded down the phone for Busch to give the order to retreat. Busch told him he had to fight to the last man, snapping: ‘The Führer has ordered it.’ Generals Reinhardt and Zeitzler shouted at one another for over an hour before finally agreeing that all but one division could be allowed to make a run for it. In the meantime Gollwitzer disobeyed orders and tried to break out. He failed. He tried again in the evening, amidst the chaos of shelling and strafing from the air, but failed again, and was forced to watch as the ancient city went up in flames, ‘the old Tsar’s palace blazing and the ruined towers of the cathedrals and churches surrounded by brightly burning ruins of houses surmounted by thick black smoke’. The German 53rd Corps was wiped out; 17,000 survivors were taken into captivity, including Gollwitzer. The 4th Luftwaffe Field Division, which had managed to get out of Vitebsk, was mown down in the forests on the outskirts of the town.
A few months before Bagration, the great painter Marc Chagall had published an address to his beloved Vitebsk from his exile in New York. The ‘saddened wanderer’ could ‘only paint your breath on my pictures’, he said of his beautiful home town. Before the fires of 1941 and 1944 the ancient city that Chagall had known had been one of the gems of Byelorussia. Lying on the hills above the Vitba River, its spires and domes and ornate wooden houses had spilled down towards the bridges and out to the harbour. Few German soldiers would have known that this was the great artist’s birthplace, but those few who had seen the pre-war exhibitions at the Sturm Gallery in Berlin would have remembered the swirling images of the city, with Chagall and his adored wife Bella floating in the sky above its chimneys and spires and rooftops. Chagall had wept when he heard of the destruction of the Jewish quarter in 1942. When he