Russia at war 1941-1945

The largest delaying force was that progressively isolated in an ever-shrinking area of East Prussia; but there were also garrisons at Poznan, Torun and, later, at Schneidemühl and Breslau. A handful were still resisting desperately in the castle of the Teutonic Knights at Marienburg. In their retreat through Poland the Germans destroyed what they could— railway bridges above all—but they had no time to destroy Lodz or Cracow, or

the great sources of wealth that Silesia represented to the new Polish State.

In many of the conquered towns of Germany there was a babel of tongues—French war-

prisoners who had worked on the land ("It was we Frenchmen who ran the agriculture of East Prussia in the last two years," some of them later claimed); British prisoners, many of them survivors of Dunkirk and almost old residents; American newcomers—G.I.'s

captured at Bastognes a few weeks before, who had gone into Germany from one end,

and were now coming out at the other; Dutch workers, Belgian workers, French workers, Polish slaves, Russian slaves, Italians—not much better than slaves either —it was rather crazy, jolly and chaotic.

Later, in March, I was to see many British, American, French and other ex-war prisoners who were being sent home by sea via Odessa. The first days of their liberation had been pretty rough-and-tumble, and each had some tragic, or comic, story to tell. A kind of real international solidarity had developed among them, and if things sometimes went wrong, as they were bound to do, it couldn't be helped. The Russian armies had plenty of other things to worry about but, by and large, the repatriation through Odessa was done as well as could be expected in exceptionally difficult circumstances.

[Some had even arrived in Odessa with their "wives", mostly Ukrainian girls who had been deported to Germany. I saw six English lads with Ukrainian "wives"—they all claimed to have gone through some sort of religious marriage ceremony in Germany—

and all six couples lived happily together in Odessa in a schoolroom. There was a seventh couple—a London lad with a German girl from East Prussia, a plucky young thing who,

he claimed, had saved both his life and that of a Russian officer, who had thereupon given them his blessing. Unfortunately, the Ukrainian girls—rather raw village specimens they were—were not allowed to go to England with their Tommy husbands, and the poor

plucky German girl was informed by the British repatriation authorities that her

"husband" already had a wife in London.]

*

Despite the spectacular Russian advance through January and February, and great

superiority in both men and every kind of equipment, the Germans were not cracking up yet. Ehrenburg's daily outbursts of gloating, mostly on the subject of "see-how-they-run", did not strictly correspond to the facts. I remember a Russian major saying to me: "In some places their resistance reminds me of Sebastopol; those German soldiers can be

quite heroic at times." And a professional soldier wrote in Red Star in February: How fierce the battles are in the Poznan area may be judged from this episode: in one of the suburbs of Poznan some five hundred German soldiers and officers were

cut off from the rest. Having entrenched themselves in a number of stone buildings, they continued to resist our advancing troops till they were nearly all destroyed.

Only the last fifty Germans, who realised the uselessness of further resistance,

surrendered.

The Germans were certainly not easily surrendering to the Russians; their chief hope, except when trapped or left behind for delaying actions, was to get beyond the Oder. By the end of January the German losses since the beginning of the offensive were put by the Russians at 552 planes, 2,995 tanks, 15,000 guns and mortars, 26,000 machine guns,

34,000 motor vehicles, 295,000 dead—but only 86,000 prisoners; and even this figure

may have been an exaggeration. Throughout February, the Russian advance went on

relentlessly. Every night the German radio played light music— what else were they to do? And then a male voice would say dismally that here was the report from the Fiihrer's headquarters: "After heroic resistance, Elbing has fallen... The enemy has broken into Posen and Schneidemühl... The Bolsheviks are suffering enormous losses. They lost