The attack on East Prussia

At four in the morning on 16 October 1944 the artillery of the 3rd Belorussian Front opened an hour-long preparatory bombardment on the sector between Suwałki and the Neman, and at six the infantry and tanks moved forward against the German positions shielding East Prussia. So began the Gumbinnen–Goldap operation, named after the two towns that were its objectives: Gumbinnen (today Gusev) and Goldap (Gołdap). It was the Red Army’s first attempt to break deep into German territory as it had stood before 1939 – not into the lands annexed after the invasion of Poland, but into a province that had belonged to Prussia for centuries. The popular account according to which the Red Army attacked German forces in East Prussia on this day needs a small qualification: on 16 October the attack was still launched from Lithuanian territory, and the main forces of the front crossed the Reich’s border, fighting all the way, over the next two days.

Two months after reaching the border

The Red Army had reached the borders of East Prussia in the second half of August 1944, at the end of its great offensive in Belorussia and Lithuania. The front on this sector then went quiet, and the main Soviet forces were turned north, towards Latvia and Estonia. At the beginning of October the 1st Baltic Front cut off Army Group North in Courland by reaching the Baltic near Palanga and Klaipėda.

On 3 October the Stavka ordered the commander of the 3rd Belorussian Front, General of the Army Ivan Chernyakhovsky, to destroy the German Tilsit–Insterburg grouping and, advancing 170–180 kilometres westwards, to take Königsberg. The offensive was also meant to tie down German reserves and prevent any attempt to break through to relieve the forces trapped in Courland. According to Russian figures the front numbered some 404,000 men and just under 700 tanks in five combined-arms armies. The main blow, from the Vilkaviškis area towards Gumbinnen and on along the Pregel, was to be delivered by the adjoining wings of Colonel General Nikolai Krylov’s 5th Army (PL) and Colonel General Kuzma Galitsky’s 11th Guards Army; the 28th Army was held in reserve.

The plan, as Russian military historians later admitted too, was too ambitious for the forces of a single front. East Prussia was the most heavily fortified part of the Eastern Front. Besides the old fortifications, among them the fortified area along the Angerapp, further belts of trenches, anti-tank ditches and bunkers had been built over the summer, for which Gauleiter Erich Koch had employed tens of thousands of civilians, Hitler Youth boys and forced labourers. Every village and estate had been prepared for all-round defence, while rivers, forests and marshes hampered the movement of tanks. The province was defended by General of Infantry Friedrich Hossbach’s Fourth Army, part of Colonel General Georg-Hans Reinhardt’s Army Group Centre, and behind it, near Rastenburg (Kętrzyn), still lay the headquarters of Adolf Hitler – the Wolf’s Lair.

The drive on Gumbinnen and Goldap

From the very first hours the battle became a laborious gnawing through successive lines of defence. The Soviet infantry stormed one strongpoint after another, and progress was measured in kilometres a day. On 18 October units of the front fought their way across the border and onto East Prussian territory; over the following days the border towns of Schirwindt and Eydtkuhnen were taken. By 20 October the 11th Guards Army had broken through the main defensive belt and advanced more than 30 kilometres.

That day Chernyakhovsky committed his armoured reserve – the 2nd Guards Tatsinskaya Tank Corps. The tanks forced the Rominte and the Angerapp, and the leading units broke into Goldap, where street fighting broke out; according to Russian studies the town was taken on 22 October. Fighting was now going on in the approaches to Gumbinnen, and the road to Insterburg and Königsberg seemed open. This happened at the same time as the formation of the Volkssturm was beginning in the Reich, covering men aged 16 to 60 who had not so far served in the army; the first hastily assembled battalions were sent into action precisely here.

The German command, however, brought in from other sectors and from reserve the 5th Panzer Division, the Hermann Göring parachute-panzer units and the Führer Escort Brigade (Führer-Begleit-Brigade) – more than 200 tanks and assault guns in all. From 21 October a bloody two-day tank encounter battle raged on the narrow Soviet salient near Gumbinnen, in the Gross Tellerode area. The Tatsinskaya Corps was almost encircled, and Chernyakhovsky allowed it to fall back 15–18 kilometres; some German authors even write of the encirclement and destruction of most of the forward Soviet forces. The 28th Army, committed to the battle, failed to break the defences; on 23 October the attempts to take Gumbinnen ceased, while on the flanks Suwałki (23 October) and Stallupönen (25 October) were still taken. On 30 October the front went over to the defensive. The Germans retook Goldap in a counter-attack on 5 November.

Nemmersdorf

The most notorious episode of those days concerned the village of Nemmersdorf (today Mayakovskoye) on the Angerapp, a dozen or so kilometres south-west of Gumbinnen. It had the only concrete bridge for miles around capable of bearing tanks. On 21 October tank crews of the Tatsinskaya Corps took it and held it until the night of 22–23 October, when they withdrew on orders. Most of its more than 600 inhabitants had managed to flee; those left behind were mainly the old, the sick and those without horses and carts, and refugees from neighbouring villages had also become stuck at the bridge.

When the Germans retook the village they found the bodies of murdered civilians. According to the findings of present-day researchers, above all the German historian Bernhard Fisch, between 19 and about 30 people were killed in and around Nemmersdorf at that time; the core of the events was the shooting of a dozen or so inhabitants who had taken refuge in a shelter by the road. The circumstances of some of the deaths remain unexplained to this day. The Soviet soldiers had earlier passed through the burnt villages of Belorussia and the sites of mass murders committed by the Germans, and Soviet front-line propaganda had for years been stoking hatred of the enemy; this does not alter the fact that those killed in Nemmersdorf were defenceless civilians.

Joseph Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry decided to make Nemmersdorf a symbol of what awaited the Germans if they lost. On 27 October the Völkischer Beobachter and other newspapers published reports of torture, rape and mass murder, illustrated with photographs of corpses which, according to later findings, had been partly staged or did not come from Nemmersdorf. Goebbels also set up an “international commission” chaired by the Estonian collaborator Hjalmar Mäe, made up – apart from a single doctor from Switzerland – of representatives of states allied to or occupied by the Reich. The campaign was meant to rally the population to resist, but according to German researchers it had less effect than expected: many inhabitants asked instead why the party authorities had not evacuated civilians from areas threatened by the fighting.

After the war Nemmersdorf became, in the Federal Republic of Germany, a symbol of the fate of the East German population, and retellings swelled with new, unverifiable details and ever higher numbers of victims. In the GDR and the USSR the subject was passed over in silence or presented solely as a propaganda fabrication; in Russia the responsibility of Soviet soldiers is disputed to this day. Research conducted since the 1990s has shown that the crime was real, but that its scale and course were greatly exaggerated in Goebbels’s propaganda and in later collective memory.

The balance sheet

According to a Russian tally of losses, the 3rd Belorussian Front lost 79,500 men in two weeks of fighting, including nearly 17,000 killed and missing, as well as about 350 tanks destroyed beyond repair. The Germans gave much higher figures for tanks destroyed (Kurt von Tippelskirch wrote of about a thousand), while the Soviet front’s staff estimated German losses at more than 37,000 killed – none of these figures from the other side is reliable without confirmation in the adversary’s records. On a sector some 140 kilometres wide the Red Army advanced 30–50 kilometres, took more than a thousand localities, including Schirwindt, Eydtkuhnen and Stallupönen, and held a bridgehead in the north-eastern corner of the province. It reached neither Königsberg nor even Gumbinnen.

The Russian military historian Makhmut Gareev later described the operation as in essence a large-scale reconnaissance in force: it revealed how strong the defences of East Prussia were and how fiercely the Germans would fight on their own soil. In Soviet historiography it was for years almost ignored as a failure. Its lessons were used in planning the next offensive, for which the Stavka allotted two fronts and far more artillery and engineers.

Its place in the war

The autumn attack on East Prussia was the first sign that the war Germany had been waging on other people’s territory since 1939 was coming home to the Reich – at the same time as, in the west, the Americans were fighting for Aachen, the first large German city in their path. For Hitler, whose headquarters at the Wolf’s Lair now lay a few dozen kilometres from the front line, it was a warning; he finally left East Prussia on 20 November 1944 and never returned. For the province’s population October 1944 was a portent of catastrophe: the party authorities, and Gauleiter Koch in particular, continued to block an orderly evacuation.

The front in East Prussia held until January 1945. On 13 January the 3rd and 2nd Belorussian Fronts began the East Prussian operation, which within a few weeks cut the province off from the Reich. The flight of hundreds of thousands of civilians across the frozen Vistula Lagoon, the mass rape, murder and looting committed by Soviet soldiers, and deportations for labour in the USSR cost the population of East Prussia far more lives than Nemmersdorf. Chernyakhovsky was killed on 18 February 1945 near Mehlsack (Pieniężno), and Königsberg surrendered on 9 April. Under the decisions of the Potsdam Conference the province was divided between Poland and the USSR; former Gumbinnen, Nemmersdorf and Insterburg ended up in the Kaliningrad Oblast, and Goldap within the borders of Poland.