The East Prussian offensive begins

Early on the morning of 13 January 1945 the troops of General of the Army Ivan Chernyakhovsky’s 3rd Belorussian Front went over to the attack on the eastern edge of East Prussia, between Pillkallen and Stallupönen, in the direction of Gumbinnen, Insterburg and Königsberg. The next day, 14 January, Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky’s 2nd Belorussian Front struck from its bridgeheads on the Narew. So began the East Prussian offensive – in Russian historiography one of the largest strategic operations of the war, formally lasting until 25 April 1945. Its aim was to cut off the German forces in East Prussia from the rest of the Reich, destroy them and take the province from which the attack on Poland from the north had been launched in 1939.

Popular chronologies state under 12 January that the East Prussian offensive “begins on 13 January”, and under 13 January that the 1st Belorussian Front attacked Pillkallen, meeting strong resistance from the German Third Panzer Army. The date and the enemy are right, but not the name of the front: East Prussia was attacked by the 3rd and 2nd Belorussian Fronts, while Marshal Georgy Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front stood on the middle Vistula and on 14 January attacked from the Magnuszew and Puławy bridgeheads as part of the Vistula–Oder offensive.

East Prussia after the autumn attempt

The Red Army had reached the borders of East Prussia in August 1944, at the end of Operation Bagration. In October the 3rd Belorussian Front made its first attempt to break into the depths of the province. The Gumbinnen–Goldap operation (16–30 October) gained it a strip of German territory several dozen kilometres deep, including Stallupönen (the Germans recaptured Goldap, which had been taken, on 5 November), but it came to a halt a dozen or so kilometres short of Gumbinnen, at the cost of heavy losses. In its course civilians were killed at Nemmersdorf, an event that Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda presented – with partly staged photographs – as a foretaste of what awaited all Germans in the event of defeat. According to historians’ findings, between 19 and about 30 people died there; for a long time the affair became a symbol in the Reich and one of the arguments for fighting to the end.

In the north, General of the Army Ivan Bagramyan’s 1st Baltic Front, as part of the Baltic offensive, had reached the sea near Palanga in October and cut off Army Group North in Courland. Memel (Klaipėda), surrounded on the landward side, held out as a German bridgehead. Through November and December the front in East Prussia did not move. On 20 November Adolf Hitler left the Wolf’s Lair near Rastenburg (Kętrzyn) and never returned to the headquarters where he had spent most of the war against the Soviet Union.

Both sides knew that the next blow was coming. Since the autumn the Germans had been building a system of field fortifications in the province, based on older fortifications: the Heilsberg fortified area (Heilsberger Dreieck), the positions along the Masurian Lakes with the Boyen fortress at Lötzen (Giżycko), and the defensive belts on the Insterburg axis, which ran from Gumbinnen through Insterburg straight to Königsberg. They were dug by tens of thousands of people – the local population, members of the Hitler Youth, forced labourers. Men unfit for military service were enrolled in the Volkssturm, whose creation had been announced in October. Königsberg, Pillau, Lötzen and, further west, Graudenz (Grudziądz) and Thorn (Toruń) were declared fortresses (Festungen), which were to hold out even if surrounded.

Forces and plans

East Prussia and northern Mazovia were defended by Colonel General Georg-Hans Reinhardt’s Army Group Centre. On the eastern sector, from the Curonian Lagoon along the Neman and in front of Gumbinnen, stood Colonel General Erhard Raus’s Third Panzer Army – which, despite its name, consisted mainly of infantry and Volksgrenadier divisions. South of it, in the arc of the Masurian Lakes and along the Augustów Canal, the Fourth Army of General of Infantry Friedrich Hossbach held the line – the same Hossbach who, as Hitler’s adjutant, had drawn up the memorandum of the secret conference in the Reich Chancellery in November 1937. Along the Narew, facing the Soviet bridgeheads at Różan and Serock, stood General Walter Weiß’s Second Army. According to German and Russian figures the army group had about 580,000 men (plus about 200,000 in the Volkssturm), about 8,000 guns and mortars and 700 tanks and assault guns. Panzer Corps Großdeutschland formed the reserve.

On the Soviet side both Belorussian Fronts and the 43rd Army of the 1st Baltic Front were assigned to the operation: according to Russian data, a total of about 1.67–1.7 million men, 25,000–30,000 guns and mortars, more than 3,000 tanks and self-propelled guns and about 3,000 combat aircraft. Their superiority was great, but not as overwhelming as on the Vistula, and many of the infantry divisions had been badly bled – according to Polish studies their average strength was about 60 per cent of establishment.

The plan of the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command (the Stavka) envisaged two blows. The 3rd Belorussian Front was to break through the defences north of Gumbinnen, destroy the Tilsit–Insterburg grouping and advance along the Pregel on Königsberg. The main attack was to be delivered by Lieutenant General Ivan Lyudnikov’s 39th Army, Colonel General Nikolai Krylov’s 5th Army and Lieutenant General Aleksandr Luchinsky’s 28th Army, with the 11th Guards Army behind them in the second echelon, while in the north, from the bank of the frozen Neman, Lieutenant General Afanasy Beloborodov’s 43rd Army was to widen the attack. The 2nd Belorussian Front was to strike from the Różan bridgehead on Mława and then on Marienburg (Malbork), in order to reach the lower Vistula and separate East Prussia from the rest of the German front, with a subsidiary attack from the Serock bridgehead on Nasielsk, Płońsk and Sierpc. Colonel General Vasily Volsky’s 5th Guards Tank Army waited in the front’s reserve.

The two winter operations – the Vistula–Oder and the East Prussian – were linked in time. The Vistula–Oder offensive began on 12 January from the Baranów–Sandomierz bridgehead, and the attack in East Prussia was to follow a day later. According to the Soviet version, based on the correspondence between Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill of 6–7 January, the date was brought forward to relieve the Allies, who were dealing in the west with the consequences of the Ardennes offensive. Historians point out, however, that the date was determined above all by preparations and the weather, and that the German offensive in the west had long since stalled.

The attack at Gumbinnen

The Germans were expecting the blow. At six in the morning on 13 January the Soviet forward battalions went into action, tasked with locating the defences by reconnaissance in force. It turned out that the first line of trenches was held only by outposts – the Third Panzer Army’s command had pulled its main forces back into depth and, as soon as the attack began, laid heavy artillery fire on the areas where the Soviet assault groupings were assembling. The Soviet bombardment therefore did not have the expected effect, and low cloud and fog practically kept the aircraft of the 1st Air Army out of the battle.

After the artillery preparation, infantry and tanks moved against the positions between Pillkallen (from 1938 Schloßberg, today Dobrovolsk) and Stallupönen (today Nesterov). Progress was minimal. According to Russian studies the 39th and 5th Armies penetrated 2–3 kilometres into the defences, and only in the sector of the 28th Army, directly east of Gumbinnen, did individual units advance 5–7 kilometres. The heavy resistance of the Third Panzer Army recorded under this date was therefore entirely real.

On 14 January the Germans went over to counter-attacks, especially in the 5th Army’s sector. When the weather improved at midday, ground-attack aircraft flew several hundred sorties against German tanks, and on 15 January the air forces of two fronts delivered heavy blows on the German positions. The 2nd Guards Tank Corps, committed to the battle, failed to bring a breakthrough. By the evening of 15 January the front’s assault grouping had advanced 6–10 kilometres and broken through the main defensive belt – as Russian studies themselves admit, it had taken three days to accomplish the task set for the first day. Losses were very heavy.

The breakthrough came on the northern flank. Chernyakhovsky shifted the weight of the attack to where the defence was giving way: on 18 January the 1st Tank Corps went into the breach on the 39th Army’s flank and reached the river Inster, and the 11th Guards Army was committed behind it. On the night of 19–20 January units of the 43rd and 39th Armies took Tilsit. In the following days Gumbinnen fell and – after a night assault on 21–22 January – Insterburg (today Chernyakhovsk). By the end of January the troops of the 3rd Belorussian Front, forcing one river after another – the Deime, the Pregel and the Alle (Łyna) – had reached the outer ring of the Königsberg defences.

The blow from the Narew

The 2nd Belorussian Front attacked on 14 January from its bridgeheads on the Narew at Różan and Serock. Here too fog restricted air operations, and the Second Army fought back fiercely: in two days both assault groupings advanced only 7–8 kilometres. The breakthrough came on 16 January, when in better weather Colonel General Konstantin Vershinin’s 4th Air Army flew, according to Russian data, more than 2,500 combat sorties. Rokossovsky’s troops took Pułtusk, Nasielsk and Maków Mazowiecki. In those days Hitler, trying to save the collapsing front on the Vistula, ordered Panzer Corps Großdeutschland to be transferred from East Prussia to the Łódź area – against the wishes of Reinhardt and of the Chief of the Army General Staff, Heinz Guderian, who had failed to persuade Hitler to send more forces east from the west.

On 17 January Rokossovsky committed the 5th Guards Tank Army to the breach. By the evening of 18 January, according to Polish studies, the breach was 110 kilometres wide and 60 kilometres deep, and on 19 January Mława fell. Then the plan was changed. Instead of driving west towards the lower Vistula, on 20 January the 2nd Belorussian Front turned north, towards Osterode (Ostróda) and Elbing (Elbląg) – so as to reach the Vistula Lagoon as quickly as possible and cut the line of retreat of the German Fourth Army, whose main forces were still standing on the Masurian Lakes. Some Soviet literature treats this stage as a separate Mława–Elbing operation (PL) (14–26 January).

The turn took the Germans by surprise. Neidenburg (Nidzica) fell on 21 January, on 22 January the 3rd Guards Cavalry Corps took Allenstein (Olsztyn), and on 23 January the leading tanks broke into Elbing, though they did not take the city itself, which held out until 10 February. On 26 January units of the 5th Guards Tank Army reached the shore of the Vistula Lagoon near Tolkemit (Tolkmicko). East Prussia had been cut off from its land link with the rest of the Reich; the Third Panzer Army, the Fourth Army and part of the Second Army were encircled.

Seeing the danger, Hossbach had from 22 January been withdrawing the Fourth Army from the Masurian Lakes on his own initiative, abandoning the fortress of Lötzen without a fight, and on the night of 26–27 January he struck westwards in an attempt to break through to the Vistula. The attack reached the area of Preußisch Holland (Pasłęk) and Mühlhausen (Młynary) and then collapsed. Hitler dismissed Reinhardt (26 January) and Hossbach (at the end of the month). The remnants of Army Group Centre in East Prussia were renamed Army Group North and placed under the command of Colonel General Lothar Rendulic.

The civilian population

Before the war East Prussia had about 2.5 million inhabitants, and in the autumn of 1944 some of the people of the border strip had already been evacuated. The Gauleiter and Oberpräsident of the province, Erich Koch, had, however, blocked a wider evacuation throughout the autumn and early winter, treating it as defeatism; leaving without permission was punishable. When the front began to move, permits to leave were issued too late or not at all, and when Soviet tanks reached the lagoon near Tolkemit on 26 January, the main escape route to the west – the road and railway through Elbing and Marienburg – was also cut.

Hundreds of thousands of people found themselves on snowbound roads in bitter frost. The advancing Soviet troops committed killings, rapes, looting and arson on a massive scale; in orders issued by the front commands in the second half of January, Soviet commanders themselves admitted that the phenomenon was getting out of control. Behind the hatred of Germans lay three and a half years of the German war of annihilation in the USSR and the propaganda that fanned it. The victims also included forced labourers and prisoners of war from many countries, among them Poles who had earlier been deported to East Prussia. The scale of civilian losses in East Prussia in 1945 remains a matter of estimates, which vary according to method and to whether they include the victims of flight, violence, hunger and disease.

Place in the war

The operation that had struggled to get going at Gumbinnen on 13 January split the German front in the north within two weeks. Together with the parallel offensive from the Vistula, it meant that the entire Eastern Front from the Baltic to the Carpathians was on the move, and the Wehrmacht, its reserves used up in the Ardennes and in Hungary, had nothing with which to plug the gaps. The armies cut off in East Prussia could no longer influence the defence of Pomerania and Berlin, but at the same time they tied down the forces of two Soviet fronts for the next three months.

The fighting in the province proved to be among the bloodiest of the last year of the war. On 23 January the Kriegsmarine began Operation Hannibal – the evacuation by sea of soldiers and civilians from the ports of East Prussia and Pomerania – and on 30 January a Soviet submarine sank the Wilhelm Gustloff, packed with refugees, in the Baltic. The main forces of the Fourth Army were trapped in a pocket on the lagoon between Heilsberg (Lidzbark Warmiński) and Braunsberg (Braniewo), known after Heiligenbeil (today Mamonovo) as the Heiligenbeil pocket, which was eliminated in March. On 18 February Chernyakhovsky was killed by a shell near Mehlsack (Pieniężno); command of the 3rd Belorussian Front passed to Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky. Königsberg, declared a fortress, was taken by storm on 6–9 April, after which General Otto Lasch capitulated, and on 25 April Pillau fell, formally ending the operation. According to Russian statistical compilations, the Red Army lost about 126,500 killed and missing and more than 458,000 wounded and sick in the operation as a whole.

East Prussia ceased to exist. The Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945 divided the province: the northern part with Königsberg went to the Soviet Union (in 1946 the city was renamed Kaliningrad, and Insterburg Chernyakhovsk, in honour of the fallen front commander), while the southern part, with Olsztyn and Elbląg, was placed under Polish administration. The German population that had not fled in January and February was expelled in the following years, and its place was taken by settlers – in the Polish part also by people resettled from the former eastern borderlands and by Ukrainians and Lemkos deported in Operation Vistula. The January attack from Gumbinnen and the Narew thus closed the history of a province that for centuries had been a bastion of Prussia and Germany in the east.