The Battle of Poznań begins

On 24 January 1945 Soviet troops of Marshal Georgy Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front cut the last roads leading out of Poznań (Posen) to the north and west, and the first divisions of General Vasily Chuikov’s 8th Guards Army reached the city. The capital of occupied Greater Poland, declared a fortress by Hitler (Festung Posen), was in effect encircled. So began the Battle of Poznań – a month of fighting for the ring of forts, the tenements of the city centre and the Citadel on Winiary Hill, which ended only on 23 February with the surrender of the last defenders.

The date on which the battle began is not settled in the literature. The first Soviet attack on the city’s eastern suburbs came as early as 22 January, and the ring of encirclement was finally closed on 25 January – a date often given as the start of the siege – while Polish publications usually speak of a “month-long” battle, counting from 22 or 25 January. The date of 24 January marks the day on which Poznań was actually cut off from the rest of the German forces and a combined-arms army joined the fight for the city.

Poznań in the Warthegau

Poznań, the cradle of the Greater Poland Uprising of the turn of 1918 and 1919, was taken by the Wehrmacht in the first days of the September Campaign. In the autumn of 1939 the city – unlike Warsaw or Kraków, which found themselves in the General Government – was annexed directly to the Reich as the capital of Reichsgau Wartheland (the Warthegau). The Reich Governor and Gauleiter, Arthur Greiser, turned the province into a testing ground for Germanisation: tens of thousands of Poznań’s inhabitants were deported to the General Government, Germans brought in from the Baltic states, Volhynia and Bessarabia were settled in their homes, Polish schools, newspapers and most churches were closed, and Poles were stripped of their rights and property. As early as October 1939 the Germans set up the first concentration camp on Polish soil in Fort VII (PL), where thousands of people were murdered, and outside the city they ran the penal and investigation camp at Żabikowo (PL). Despite the deportations, Poles still made up the majority of the city’s inhabitants in 1945.

Greiser forbade the German population to prepare for evacuation until the very end, regarding it as defeatism. When the front began to move from the Vistula in mid-January 1945, he himself left Poznań on 20 January, citing a telegram from the head of the NSDAP Party Chancellery, Martin Bormann; the inhabitants and some German officials saw his departure as flight. The official evacuation of the Germans began a day later – amid chaos, frost and snow, much like the flight from East Prussia taking place further north in those same days.

Festung Posen

Its Prussian legacy had made Poznań one of the most heavily fortified cities in Central Europe. At its centre stood a nineteenth-century polygonal fortress with the Citadel – Fort Winiary – built in 1828–1842 on a hill overlooking the city and the Warta, and around the city ran the ring of the Poznań Fortress of 1876–1896: nine main forts and nine intermediate ones. The earth-and-brick forts were obsolete in the face of twentieth-century artillery and during the war served mainly as depots, workshops and prisons, but their thick walls, moats and underground passages still offered the defenders good cover.

In 1944, as the front approached the borders of the Reich, Hitler ordered important towns to be turned into “fortresses” (feste Plätze) which, once surrounded, were to tie down as many enemy forces as possible. The Chief of the Army General Staff, General Heinz Guderian, planned several defensive belts between the Vistula and the Oder; Poznań, lying on the shortest route from Warsaw to Berlin and one of the most important railway junctions of eastern Germany, was to be a key point of a line running from Piła through Poznań to Głogów. The plans provided for three rings of defences around the city, but little was built: mainly an anti-tank ditch was dug and a dozen or so shelters were added between the forts. The first commandant of the fortress, General Heinz Deindl, appointed in September 1944, urged that the defence be confined to a smaller area; the Army High Command rejected his proposals and replaced him with Generalmajor Ernst Mattern. Preparations were also hampered by the German command’s belief that there would be no great offensive in the east in winter – reserves were sent to the Ardennes offensive and to Alsace.

The fortress alert was declared on 20 January. Mattern took command of all soldiers in the city and incorporated into the garrison fortress and training battalions, officer cadets, soldiers returning from leave, police, anti-aircraft crews, Volkssturm units and the remnants of Ninth Army units shattered on the Vistula. The strength of the garrison is one of the most disputed questions of the battle. Older Polish studies, starting with Zbigniew Szumowski’s work, gave a figure of 61,500 defenders; more recent research – including that of Günther Baumann and Michał Krzyżaniak – regards this number as greatly inflated and puts the garrison at about 15,000, at most 20,000 soldiers, including several hundred Hungarians and a group of volunteers from the Baltic states. There were also thousands of wounded in the hospitals. Mattern asked Guderian for permission to withdraw from the unprepared fortress, but was ordered to defend it to the last man. The fortress area was divided into sectors: an eastern (right-bank) sector commanded by Colonel Ernst Gonell, a western (left-bank) sector and a Warta valley sector.

The attack on the move (22–24 January)

The offensive launched on 12 January by Marshal Ivan Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front and taken up on 14 January by the 1st Belorussian Front from the Magnuszew and Puławy bridgeheads shattered the German defence on the Vistula within days. On 17 January Soviet troops and units of the Polish 1st Army entered Warsaw, and on 19 January the 8th Guards Army took Łódź. Zhukov’s tank armies pressed westwards, bypassing German strongpoints. Zhukov ordered the commander of the 1st Guards Tank Army, General Mikhail Katukov, to take the unprepared fortress on the move. In doing so the armoured spearheads got more than a hundred kilometres ahead of the infantry.

On 22 January the 8th Guards Mechanised Corps took Swarzędz without a fight and in the afternoon struck at Poznań’s eastern suburbs. The attack on Antoninek and Rataje stalled under fire from the forts. At the same time a Soviet mechanised brigade seized the Focke-Wulf works at Krzesiny together with its airfield and – guided by Polish locals – took infantry across the ice to the left bank of the Warta near Czapury. A renewed frontal attack on 23 January collapsed after a few hours. It became clear that tanks alone would not take the city; front headquarters decided that the tank army would bypass Poznań and push on westwards, while the infantry took over the fortress.

During the night of 23–24 January Katukov’s units crossed the Warta south of the city near Czapury and to the north near Czerwonak and Różany Młyn. Inhabitants of the surrounding villages helped to build the crossings and strengthen the ice. Several armoured cars burst onto Ławica airfield, where, according to Soviet figures, more than a hundred aircraft were destroyed. By the afternoon of 24 January all roads leading out of the city to the north and west had been cut. The same day the first divisions of the 29th Guards Rifle Corps of Chuikov’s 8th Guards Army (PL) – formerly the 62nd Army, which had defended Stalingrad in the autumn of 1942 – reached Poznań and attacked the city straight off the march, in column. The unprepared assault collapsed with heavy losses. At midnight on 24–25 January the German command subordinated Fortress Poznań to the newly formed Army Group Vistula, at whose head Hitler had placed the Reichsführer-SS, Heinrich Himmler.

On 25 January the ring around the city finally closed. Chuikov and Katukov were at one in urging Zhukov that the tank armies should press on to the Oder and leave the encircled city to the infantry. And so it was: the 1st Guards Tank Army set off towards the Międzyrzecz Fortified Region, leaving outside Poznań only Colonel Amazasp Babadzhanian’s 11th Guards Tank Corps, which blocked the defenders’ way west. The siege was taken over by four divisions of the 8th Guards Army and two divisions of the 91st Rifle Corps of General Vladimir Kolpakchi’s 69th Army, supported by powerful artillery and by assault groups trained in street fighting.

The inhabitants of the besieged city

The battle began in a city where several tens of thousands of Poles remained. Mattern feared an uprising and on 22 January ordered the evacuation of the Polish population as well, and on 23 January called on civilians to leave the city; most Poles ignored these orders, and the roads were in any case almost cut. In the last days before the encirclement the Gestapo murdered most of the prisoners held in the jail on Młyńska Street and in the Soldiers’ House (PL), the seat of the Poznań Gestapo, as well as the prisoners of the Żabikowo camp who were unfit to march; the rest were driven west.

Throughout the month of fighting the inhabitants lived in cellars, without electricity, water or food supplies, under the artillery fire of both sides. According to estimates cited by Poznań historians, some 600–650 civilians were killed. In the suburbs taken by Soviet troops Poles helped the attackers from the very first days – as guides, building the crossings over the Warta and carrying the wounded. Polish accounts and studies also record that the Soviet troops brought with them looting, rape and arrests by the Soviet security organs, and that in the districts they took, offices subordinate to the communist Provisional Government and the Citizens’ Militia were set up at once. For the people of Poznań the end of the German occupation thus also meant the beginning of a new authority imposed by Moscow.

A month of fighting – what followed

From 25 January units of the 8th Guards Army and the 69th Army steadily tightened the ring. As early as 26 January two Guards divisions took two forts in the south in a swift attack, which made it possible to assault the remaining forts from the city side. One fort after another fell after bombardment by heavy artillery and attacks by sappers with explosive charges and flamethrowers; the defenders fell back towards the centre. At the turn of January and February Mattern was replaced as commandant by Gonell, soon promoted to Generalmajor – sources give different dates for this change, from 28 January to 7 February. Gonell imposed draconian discipline and counted on relief, which the German command was no longer able to send.

On 5 February Soviet units broke into the left-bank city centre. In the first half of February the fighting went on house by house for the Imperial Quarter and the Old Town, and on the right bank of the Warta for Rataje, Śródka and Ostrów Tumski. Artillery fire and fires destroyed much of the buildings around the Old Market Square, including the Renaissance town hall, and the cathedral was badly damaged. During the night of 15–16 February several groups of defenders – between one and two thousand soldiers by various estimates – tried to break out to the west; at most a few hundred men reached their own lines on the Oder. The rest of the garrison concentrated in the Citadel.

The assault on the Citadel began on 18 February. The deep moat, steep ramparts and the redoubts flanking the moat meant that the fighting lasted several days. In the final phase some 2,000 inhabitants of Poznań, later known as the Cytadelowcy (PL) (“Citadel men”), were drawn into the assault. There were volunteers among them, but – as more recent studies stress – many had been forcibly mobilised by Citizens’ Militia stations with the participation of Soviet soldiers, often without training or proper weapons; between 84 and about 100 of them were killed. During the night of 22–23 February Gonell committed suicide, and on the morning of 23 February – at about 6 a.m., according to Poznań sources – Mattern surrendered. Depending on the source and on how the wounded are counted, between about 12,000 and more than 20,000 soldiers were taken prisoner.

Soviet losses are estimated at about 6,000 killed and died of wounds (Adam Pleskaczyński; the Russian historian Alexei Isaev gives 4,887 irrecoverable losses), German losses at several thousand killed. According to post-war calculations, about 55 per cent of the city’s buildings were destroyed or seriously damaged, and 80–90 per cent in the Old Town.

The battle’s place in the war

The Battle of Poznań was – alongside the fighting for Wrocław, Gdańsk and Kołobrzeg – one of the largest urban battles on Polish soil in 1945, and also the first great test of Hitler’s “fortress” concept. From the German point of view the fortress fulfilled part of its task: for a month it tied down several Soviet divisions and blocked the most important rail and road junction on the Berlin axis, which hampered the supply of the troops that had reached the Oder at the end of January. It did not, however, stop the offensive – Zhukov’s tank armies bypassed the city and by the turn of January and February had seized bridgeheads on the western bank of the Oder, a few dozen kilometres from Berlin. The price of a defence prolonged in a hopeless situation was thousands killed on both sides, the deaths of hundreds of civilians and a ruined city.

Both sides drew on the experience of Poznań. The Germans declared further fortresses – Wrocław, Kołobrzeg, Königsberg, Głogów – whose defence cost even more lives. Chuikov’s assault groups, which had perfected at Poznań the tactics of fighting for forts and city blocks, led the attack on Berlin a few weeks later. For Poznań the end of the fighting on 23 February 1945 meant the end of German occupation and of annexation to the Reich, but also a reconstruction that lasted many years and life under a regime imposed by the USSR. For decades the memory of the battle was shaped in the spirit of “liberation” and brotherhood in arms; only after 1989 did Poznań historians revise the inflated figures for the defenders and recall the forced nature of part of the mobilisation of the Cytadelowcy and the violence that accompanied the Red Army’s arrival.