The bridgehead on the Oder

On Wednesday 31 January 1945, at around 8 a.m., Soviet infantry stepped out onto the ice of the Oder north of Kostrzyn (Küstrin). The ice was thin, the river more than a hundred metres wide, and on the far bank lay the Brandenburg village of Kienitz (PL). The soldiers crossed the river on foot, surprised the few German outposts and took the village together with its railway station. They were about 70 kilometres from Berlin. For the first time in the war the Red Army stood on the western bank of the Oder on the Berlin axis.

The statement that on this day the Red Army “crossed the Oder and entered Germany” needs qualifying. Soviet troops had been fighting on German soil in East Prussia since October 1944, and in Silesia since about 20 January 1945. Units of the 1st Ukrainian Front had also crossed the Oder earlier, in the second half of January, near Oława and Ścinawa. What was new on 31 January was that a bridgehead had been established directly in front of Berlin. The distance found in war chronologies – “less than 50 miles” – is accurate: Kienitz lies about 70 km, or some 43 miles, from the capital of the Reich.

From the Vistula to the Oder in nineteen days

The bridgehead at Kienitz crowned an offensive that had opened on 12 January from the Sandomierz bridgehead and on 14 January from the Magnuszew and Puławy bridgeheads. Marshal Georgy Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front and Marshal Ivan Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front had smashed the German Army Group A within a few days. On 17 January soldiers of the Polish 1st Army and the Red Army entered the ruins of Warsaw, on 19 January Łódź fell, and the Soviet armoured spearheads raced on westwards, bypassing centres of resistance.

The pace was unprecedented. The tank armies covered several dozen kilometres a day, with the infantry following on forced marches. Hitler declared the largest cities of Greater Poland and Pomerania fortresses, which were to hold out to the last and tie down enemy forces. This was the fate of Poznań, where the battle for the city began on 24 January: Soviet troops encircled it and pressed on westwards, leaving the assault to the second-echelon armies. In the north, meanwhile, the 2nd and 3rd Belorussian Fronts were conducting the East Prussian offensive, and a great flight of civilians had begun from East Prussia.

At the end of January Zhukov’s armies crossed the old Polish–German border and entered the Neumark. On 29 and 30 January they passed through the fortifications of the Międzyrzecz Fortified Region, which the Germans had not managed to man properly. Only the Oder valley now lay ahead of them.

Yesipenko’s detachment at Kienitz

At the head of General Nikolai Berzarin’s 5th Shock Army marched the forward detachment of Colonel Khariton Yesipenko, deputy commander of the 89th Guards Rifle Division. According to Russian sources it consisted of the 1006th Rifle Regiment of the 266th Rifle Division, the 220th Independent Tank Brigade and the 89th Independent Heavy Tank Regiment, reinforced with artillery. Its task was not to get drawn into fighting but to reach the Oder as fast as possible and seize a crossing. After a march that Yesipenko’s biography puts at about 70 km, it reached the river on the night of 30/31 January.

In the morning the infantry crossed over the ice. Fyodor Bokov, a member of the military council of the 5th Shock Army, wrote in his memoirs that two battalions crossed the river “in marching order” at about eight o’clock. Russian accounts also mention the battalion of Major Ivan Yevplov. In Kienitz the soldiers found the Germans completely unprepared: the outposts guarding the crossing over the ice were taken prisoner, and at the station stood a military train bound for Berlin. According to Bokov it was carrying 6 anti-aircraft guns, 13 officers and 63 officer cadets of an anti-aircraft artillery school. Forced labourers and prisoners of war working on the surrounding estates were also freed.

The ice would not have borne heavy tanks, and the sappers had not yet had time to build crossings, so for the time being it was mainly infantry with light artillery that reached the western bank. By evening the detachment had widened the bridgehead; once reinforcements arrived, it was, according to Bokov, about 6 km wide and up to 2.5 km deep. The same day the spearheads of General Semyon Bogdanov’s 2nd Guards Tank Army reached the Oder near Kostrzyn. Soviet soldiers entered the nearby prisoner-of-war camp Stalag III-C at Drzewice (Alt Drewitz), and in the town itself, as its history records, the trams stopped running that day.

Kienitz, today part of the municipality of Letschin in Brandenburg, was the first place in what later became East Germany to be taken by the Red Army. In 1970 a monument with a T-34 tank was erected there.

Kostrzyn – the gateway to Berlin

Kostrzyn (Küstrin) lay at the confluence of the Warta and the Oder, on the main road and railway line from Poznań to Berlin. Its sixteenth-century fortress (PL) no longer had much military value, but the town commanded the crossings over both rivers. Hitler declared it a fortress (Festung Küstrin). Its commandant was SS-Gruppenführer Heinz Reinefarth, the same man whose units had carried out the Wola massacre in August 1944 during the Warsaw Uprising.

Kostrzyn could not be taken on the move. South of the town, units of General Vasily Chuikov’s 8th Guards Army (PL), which had come up from Poznań, forced the Oder at the beginning of February and seized further small bridgeheads. According to Russian accounts, until mid-February the Germans mounted five to ten counter-attacks a day with tank support, and Bokov writes of 12 attacks on Yesipenko’s bridgehead on 1 February alone. The Luftwaffe, reinforced with aircraft brought in from the west, bombed the ice and the crossings. The bridgeheads held.

An improvised defence of the Reich

The collapse of the Vistula front took the German command by surprise, even though the Chief of the Army General Staff, General Heinz Guderian, had been warning of it for weeks. Hitler, who had returned to Berlin on 16 January from his headquarters in Hesse, refused to transfer the main forces from the West to the East: he sent the 6th SS Panzer Army, released from the Ardennes, to Hungary, where the siege of Budapest was under way. On 19 January he reserved for himself all decisions on the withdrawal of divisions and larger formations.

A gap opened between the battered armies of Army Group Centre in East Prussia and Army Group A in Silesia. To close it, on 24 January Hitler created Army Group Vistula and gave command of it to Heinrich Himmler. The Reichsführer-SS had no experience of commanding large operational formations; in his post-war memoirs Guderian presented the appointment as one of Hitler’s most damaging ideas. At first Army Group Vistula existed largely on paper. On the middle Oder the 9th Army was being rebuilt from the remnants of shattered divisions; in the second half of January General Theodor Busse took command of it.

The gap was filled with whatever lay to hand: Volkssturm battalions, alarm companies made up of men on leave and rear-area soldiers, NCO schools, police units, and men of the Kriegsmarine and the Luftwaffe. It was scratch units of this kind that counter-attacked the Kienitz bridgehead from 1 February onwards. In Berlin itself, into which refugees from the east had been pouring for weeks, the news that the Russians were on the Oder caused terror. Thousands of refugees camped in the railway stations, and the city authorities began digging anti-tank ditches and building barricades. Joseph Goebbels, Reich Defence Commissioner for Berlin, called for every house to be defended.

Konev’s bridgeheads in Silesia

In the south the 1st Ukrainian Front had reached the Oder earlier. After taking Kraków on 19 January and liberating Auschwitz on 27 January, its right wing came up to the river between Brzeg and Głogów. General Aleksei Zhadov’s 5th Guards Army forced the Oder near Oława and Brzeg; by 29 January a large bridgehead had been formed south of Oława. Further north, General Dmitry Lelyushenko’s 4th Tank Army (PL) and the combined-arms armies seized a bridgehead at Ścinawa (Steinau). The small town itself, which had been holding out for several days, was taken after heavy fighting on 31 January. The left wing of the front, wheeling south along the Oder, cut off and occupied the almost undamaged Upper Silesian Industrial Region.

The Ścinawa and Oława bridgeheads became the springboard for Konev’s next offensive, which in February was to encircle Wrocław (Breslau) and reach the Lusatian Neisse.

Why they did not go on to Berlin

At the end of January the Soviet staffs gave serious thought to a march on Berlin without pausing. According to documents cited in the literature, in a report to the Stavka on 26 January Zhukov proposed resuming the advance after a short replenishment of supplies and reaching Berlin by mid-February; Konev put forward similar plans to advance to the Elbe. Stalin approved them provisionally.

The reality on the Oder, however, was different. In less than three weeks the troops had covered some 500 km, and their supply lines trailed behind them across destroyed bridges and railway tracks that still had to be converted to the Soviet broad gauge. The tanks needed repairs, the rifle divisions were depleted, and the air force had not yet moved forward to advanced airfields, while the Luftwaffe was operating from concrete airfields around Berlin. A thaw at the beginning of February weakened the ice and turned the roads to mud. Most important of all, though, was the threat to the right flank: between the Oder and the Vistula, in Pomerania, stood strong German forces, covered from the west by the Pomeranian Wall. Zhukov’s front stretched out into a long, narrow wedge, and Konstantin Rokossovsky’s 2nd Belorussian Front was tied down in East Prussia.

The dispute over whether Berlin could have been taken in February broke out after the war. In the 1960s Chuikov claimed that the halt on the Oder had prolonged the war; Zhukov replied that a thrust at Berlin with an exposed flank could have ended in disaster. Most historians lean towards Zhukov’s arguments, pointing to the course of the German counter-attack in Pomerania in mid-February.

Place in the war

The Vistula–Oder offensive formally ended on 3 February 1945. According to the figures compiled by Russian historians (Grigori Krivosheev), it cost the two Soviet fronts more than 43,000 killed and missing and about 150,000 wounded and sick. The Soviet side estimated that 35 German divisions had been completely destroyed and some 150,000 soldiers taken prisoner; these figures are hard to verify. In three weeks the Red Army had advanced from the Vistula to the Oder and occupied almost all of occupied Poland, Upper Silesia and eastern Brandenburg. A new order took hold in the captured lands: the communist Provisional Government moved to Warsaw, and the NKVD arrested soldiers of the Home Army. For the Germans living east of the Oder, flight began, and soon forced expulsion.

In the weeks that followed, the Kienitz bridgehead and Chuikov’s bridgeheads south of Kostrzyn merged into a single area. On 4 February the leaders of the Big Three met at Yalta (the Yalta Conference) – Stalin could arrive there with his armies 70 km from Berlin. In mid-February the Germans launched a counter-stroke from around Stargard (Operation Sonnenwende), which confirmed the Stavka in its decision to clear Pomerania first (the East Pomeranian offensive). Kostrzyn, defended by Reinefarth, fell in stages: the New Town on 12 March, and the Old Town with the fortress at the end of March, when Reinefarth, against Hitler’s orders, broke out with the remnants of the garrison. The town was almost completely destroyed; it is sometimes called “the Polish Hiroshima”. On 20 March Himmler was replaced at the head of Army Group Vistula by General Gotthard Heinrici.

On 16 April 1945 the 1st Belorussian Front launched its offensive on Berlin from the Kostrzyn bridgehead. The first days of the Berlin offensive brought bloody fighting for the Seelow Heights, a dozen or so kilometres from Kienitz. Berzarin’s 5th Shock Army later fought in the centre of Berlin, and Berzarin himself became the city’s first Soviet commandant. The crossing of the frozen Oder on 31 January 1945 was the first step on that road: from that day the Red Army stood directly in front of the capital of the Reich and never again gave up a single step.