For the next three days 28,000 German soldiers were systematically wiped out in the area around Vitebsk. After his return from a Russian prisoner of war camp in the 1950s, General Gollwitzer wrote a bitter account of the terrible – and unnecessary – destruction of his men thanks to Hitler’s insane ‘fortress’ policy and Busch’s unwillingness to stand up to his master. ‘Under Busch,’ General Ziemke would later say, ‘Headquarters, Army Group Centre had become a mindless instrument for transmuting the Führer’s will.’29
And Vitebsk was just the beginning. Over the next few days four of Hitler’s ‘fortresses’ would tumble like bowling pins. Orsha was next. Lying on the main Moscow–Minsk road, it held the distinction of being the place where the Soviets had first used the devastating Katyusha multiple-rocket launchers, or ‘Stalin Organs’, on 14 July 1941. Now well over 2,000 of these punishing weapons were being hauled into place. In November 1812 Stendhal had witnessed the suffering of Napoleon’s retreating forces at Orsha in an ‘ocean of barbarity’, but that paled by comparison with what was now to come. The Soviet 2nd Guards Tank Corps enveloped the city in a matter of hours, moving so quickly that it took some time for the German 4th Army to realize what was happening. Desperate requests to cancel Orsha’s designation as a ‘fortress city’ were predictably refused by Hitler; finally, in despair, General Kurt von Tippelskirch disobeyed orders, lying to Busch that he was holding the line while secretly allowing his units to retreat. Desperation overtook the tens of thousands of German troops still trapped in the city. Panic-stricken men ran around, not knowing what to do; some tried to cling onto the last hospital train leaving for Minsk, but this was blown up by a unit of Soviet T-34s, hurling bloodied bodies and twisted metal into the woods. Orsha fell on the night of 26 June, only four days after the beginning of Bagration. But Hitler still refused to believe that Army Group Centre was facing the real Soviet offensive of the summer. ‘The attack will come in northern Ukraine,’ he ranted.
Something had to be done. General Jordan and the reluctant Busch flew together to Obersalzberg on 26 June to try to convince Hitler at least to change his ‘fortress’ order. Hitler was enraged at this attempt to interfere. Banging his fist on the table, he screamed at the top of his voice that he had never thought of Busch as another of those generals who was ‘always looking backwards’. Orsha must be held! In fact, it had already fallen.
Jordan was sacked on 27 June, and replaced by General Nikolaus von Vormann, who as the new commander of the 9th Army would soon find himself on the outskirts of Warsaw. Busch was removed the next day, and replaced by the foul-mouthed and abusive Field Marshal Walter Model, who would also play a pivotal role in the fight for the Polish capital. Those in FHQ called Model ‘Hitler’s fireman’; his staffers, who hated him, called him ‘Frontschwein’, but as an excellent tactician and innovator he was the best choice for the moment. Later, Hitler would call him ‘my best field marshal’ and ‘the saviour of the Eastern Front’. Rokossovsky, however, was not impressed. ‘Model? We can take on Model too,’ he said.
Hitler’s decision to appoint Model would prove crucial for the fate of the Warsaw Uprising. By now, the constellation of generals that would soon meet on the Vistula was in place. Above all, it was Model’s creation of a defensive line at the Vistula that would present the greatest challenge to Rokossovsky in August 1944, and that would have disastrous implications for the people of Warsaw.
The Soviets did not let up. The unfortunate men of Lieutenant General Rudolf Bamler’s 12th Infantry Division and Major General Gottfried von Erdmannsdorff’s city garrison had been chosen to be the human sacrifices in the next Soviet target – Mogilev. Von dem Bach, hearing of the Soviet onslaught, hastily abandoned his luxurious palace in the city, where Tsar Nicholas II had spent much of the First World War, and fled first to Minsk and then to Poznań. His staff worked at breakneck speed to move or burn the hundreds of thousands of documents outlining the deadly ‘Banditenkrieg’ that had raged in Byelorussia on his watch. Most of the evidence of the mass murder of Jews, gypsies, ‘partisans’ and ordinary civilians was lost in the flames, or was captured by the Soviets.
Mogilev was completely surrounded on 28 June. General Tippelskirch ordered a reserve Panzer grenadier division to plug the hole east of the city, but the situation there was desperate: ‘We’ve got nothing but holes here!’ General Martinek yelled back down the phone. The trapped Germans were helpless. One Red Army soldier watched in awe as Soviet planes dived over the city, blasting away at the men trapped in it: the planes were so close that he could see the stars painted on their sides. ‘The Red Army, defeated and shamed at Barbarossa, has been transformed into a technological marvel,’ he said. ‘And now we are in the Soviet rear! The Red Army passed by like a typhoon. The enemy has scuttled off in disarray. Even the Germans did not manage this in 1941!!’ Bamler and Erdmannsdorff capitulated on 30 June; Stalin had the latter hanged.
In the great staggered offensive in Byelorussia it was General Rokossovsky and the 1st Byelorussian Front that were the last to go forward, in what proved to be one of the most dramatic attacks of the war. Rokossovsky had spent weeks constructing wooden causeways and corduroy roads through the ‘impassable’ swamps; his men had swum across lakes and rivers, using four-man LMN rubber rafts and MPK rubber ‘swimming suits’ which, with their built-in inner tubes, made the wearer look like some strange floating beast. They had made their way through the dense, tangled forests using special shoes to get them across the bogs, and had built a veritable flotilla of rafts and boats, as well as platforms for trundling machine guns, light artillery and mortars into position. The massive build-up of men and matériel had been so ingeniously hidden from the Germans that when the Soviets burst upon them on 23 June the 9th Army was taken completely by surprise.
Rokossovsky pushed forward in a perfect two-pronged pincer movement around the city of Bobruisk, and on 27 June he snapped the pincers shut. A hundred thousand soldiers of the German 9th Army were trapped. On 29 June 30,000 of them slipped out of the trap, but the Soviets quickly hunted them down; only 10,000 escaped back to the German lines. There was little that could be done to save those who remained. The 20th Panzer Division had only forty tanks left against Rokossovsky’s nine hundred. ‘Bombers of S.I. Rudenko’s 16th Air Army cooperating with the 48th Army struck blow after blow at the enemy group,’ Zhukov recalled. ‘Scores of lorries, cars and tanks, fuel and oil was burning all over the battlefield … The terror-stricken German soldiers ran in every direction,’ and the cries of the dying ‘shook the strongest man’. The city, with its great fortress that had repelled even Napoleon, descended into chaos. ‘Everywhere dead bodies are lying. Dead bodies, wounded people, people screaming, medical orderlies, and then there were those who were completely covered, who were not taken out at all, who were buried there straight away.’ At 9 a.m. on 29 June permission was wrenched from Hitler to allow the 35th Army Corps and the 41st Panzer Corps to break out, but fifteen minutes later he changed his mind. Seventy thousand leaderless and confused soldiers awaited orders; some obeyed Hitler and fought, others tried to flee. The 134th Infantry Division reported that ‘no trace of order remained. Vehicles and heavy armour were simply blown up and troops escaped en masse over the remaining bridges.’ The division commander, Ernst Philipp, committed suicide in despair. At the very end, when the situation was completely hopeless, Hitler again gave them permission to break out. And then the last command arrived: ‘Destroy vehicles, shoot horses, take as much ammunition and rations with you as you can carry. Every man for himself.’ But by then they could no longer move. General Vincenz Müller ordered the men of 12th Corps to lay down their arms. He then walked over to his Soviet counterpart, General Boldin, and asked him how to surrender. ‘It is very simple,’ Boldin replied. ‘Your soldiers lay down their arms and become prisoners of war.’
The Russians swarmed through the city, killing any Germans they found hiding in the ruins. There were many atrocities and acts of revenge. A member of the 58th Regiment of the 6th Infantry Division who was hiding in a hospital reported: ‘On 29 June the Russians occupied the infirmary … They went from bed to bed systematically, pointed their machine pistols at the wounded and emptied their magazines. A great clamour arose. Today I can still hear the screams for help of the