The end of the Battle of Poznań

On the morning of 23 February 1945 the shooting on Winiary Hill in Poznań died away. The remnants of the German garrison, shut up for a week in the Citadel – the 19th-century Fort Winiary – laid down their arms before the troops of Colonel General Vasily Chuikov’s 8th Guards Army. A few hours earlier the fortress commandant, Generalmajor Ernst Gonell, had taken his own life, and the surrender was signed by his predecessor in the post, Generalmajor Ernst Mattern. So ended the Battle of Poznań – a month of fighting for the ring of forts, the districts and the city centre of a town that Hitler had declared a fortress (Festung Posen).

A month of siege

The first Soviet tanks reached the outskirts of Poznań on 22 January, and on 24 January troops of Marshal Georgy Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front cut the last roads out of the city. The tank armies failed to take the fortress on the march, so they bypassed it and pressed on westwards – by the end of January they had reached the Oder, less than 70 km from Berlin. Poznań, however, the most important rail and road junction between the Vistula and the Oder, could not be left behind the front. The siege was taken over by divisions of the 8th Guards Army and the 69th Army.

From 25 January the besiegers tightened the ring. The Prussian forts of the late 19th century fell one after another to heavy artillery fire and to assaults by sappers with demolition charges and flamethrowers. On 5 February the Soviets broke into the city centre on the left bank; in the first half of February the fighting went from house to house through the Imperial Quarter, the Old Town and the districts on the right bank of the Warta. The Renaissance town hall burned down, and the cathedral on Ostrów Tumski was badly damaged. Gonell, who had replaced Mattern as commandant at the turn of January and February and was soon promoted to Generalmajor, imposed draconian discipline in the fortress and counted on relief to the very end. No relief came. On the night of 15/16 February several groups of defenders – between one and two thousand men, according to various estimates – tried to break out to the west; at most a few hundred reached the German lines on the Oder. The rest of the garrison, including thousands of wounded, gathered in the Citadel and on the slopes of the hill.

The Citadel

The Citadel – the Germans called it the Kernwerk, or central work – was built by the Prussians in 1828–1842 on Winiary Hill (PL), which overlooks the city and the Warta valley. It was the core of the old Poznań Fortress: a polygonal work surrounded by a deep moat and high ramparts, with brick redoubts whose flanking fire swept the bottom of the ditch. Against 20th-century artillery the fortifications were obsolete, but the thick walls, casemates and underground passages still gave the defenders cover, and the moat was an effective obstacle to infantry and tanks.

The encirclement of the Citadel was closed on 17 February. The next day, 18 February, the 29th Guards Rifle Corps launched its assault. Three Guards divisions – the 27th from the north, the 82nd from the south-west and the 74th from the south-east – advanced to the ramparts after an intense artillery bombardment. The men climbed down into the moat and scaled the far slope on assault ladders, exposed to fire from the redoubts. Only once these had been destroyed with demolition charges and flamethrowers – which took almost three days – could the infantry gain a lasting foothold on the ramparts. Every bastion and every casemate was fought for; the defenders counter-attacked at night, and the wounded in the overcrowded underground passages died untended.

The Cytadelowcy

According to Polish historians, Stalin expected the Citadel to fall by 23 February – the 27th anniversary of the founding of the Red Army, celebrated in the USSR as Army Day. Chuikov’s divisions, bled white by a month of street fighting, no longer had enough infantry, and above all not enough sappers. In the last days of the assault, therefore, inhabitants of Poznań were drawn into the fighting. Some 2,000 men were organised into assault and auxiliary (so-called sapper) groups, operating under Polish or Soviet command. They went down in history as the Cytadelowcy (PL) (“Citadel men”).

For decades their story was told in simplified form – as a rising of volunteers who fought shoulder to shoulder with the Red Army to liberate their city. There were indeed volunteers among them, often people who had survived five years of German occupation in the Warthegau and wanted a share in ending it. More recent studies stress, however, that many were mobilised by force – through the stations of the Citizens’ Militia and with the help of Soviet soldiers – and thrown into battle without training or adequate weapons. The Cytadelowcy fought on 20/21–23 February; depending on the source, between 84 and about 100 of them were killed and some 300 wounded. They were buried on the slopes of the Citadel, where the Cytadelowcy cemetery stands to this day. After 1990 the inscription “Cytadela Poznańska 21–23 II 1945” (Poznań Citadel, 21–23 February 1945) was added to one of the plaques of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Warsaw.

The last night and the surrender

On 22 February sappers built a crossing over the moat, and tanks and assault guns drove into the Citadel. The defenders, squeezed into an ever smaller area, no longer stood a chance. On the night of 22/23 February Gonell allowed his men to try to get out of the fortress on their own, and then committed suicide. Mattern took command of what was left of the garrison and – according to Poznań sources, at about 6 a.m. on 23 February – surrendered. White flags were hung out on the Citadel, and soldiers and wounded began to emerge from the casemates and tunnels.

The number of prisoners, like the strength of the garrison as a whole, is disputed. Depending on the source, and on whether the wounded in the fortress hospitals were counted, between about 12,000 and more than 20,000 men went into captivity. In his memoirs Chuikov described a conversation with Mattern, who allegedly assured him that he was not a member of the Nazi Party, would not shed blood needlessly and considered Hitler finished – an account to be read bearing in mind that both men had reasons to present it in a particular light. Moscow marked the capture of Poznań with an artillery salute, and the Citadel itself – despite a week of assault – came out of the fighting relatively little damaged; the barracks redoubt suffered most.

The toll

The Battle of Poznań was one of the hardest urban battles on Polish soil in 1945. According to the findings of Adam Pleskaczyński, based on documents in the Russian military archives, at least 5,500 Soviet soldiers were killed, went missing or died of wounds (in total some 6,000 killed and died of wounds and about 16,000 wounded); the Russian historian Alexei Isaev gives just under 4,900 irrecoverable losses, while older estimates spoke of more than 10,000 killed. German losses are estimated at about 5,000–6,000 killed; almost all who survived were taken prisoner.

The city paid the highest price. According to estimates cited by Poznań historians, some 600–650 civilians died during the fighting. For a month the inhabitants lived in cellars, without electricity, water or food supplies, under fire from both sides; before the city was cut off, the Gestapo murdered most of the prisoners held in Poznań’s jails. Post-war calculations put the share of Poznań’s buildings destroyed or seriously damaged at about 55 per cent – some 5,800 buildings and 360 industrial plants – and in the Old Town at 80–90 per cent. The bridges over the Warta, the water mains and the power station were destroyed.

For Poznań the arrival of the Red Army meant the end of more than five years of German occupation, forced expulsions and terror, symbolised by the concentration camp in Fort VII. At the same time it brought looting and violence by some Soviet soldiers, deportations and arrests carried out by the NKVD, and communist rule, imposed from the first days after each district was liberated. For decades, judgements of these events depended on who was making them – and only after 1989 could Poznań historians describe the battle without the simplifications previously required.

Place in the war

Fortress Poznań did not stop the Soviet offensive – the tank armies bypassed the city within a few days – but for a month it blocked the most important communications hub behind the front on the Oder and tied down several divisions. Supply difficulties were one of the reasons why the Soviet command halted the march on Berlin in February 1945, although the threat to the northern flank from German forces in Pomerania proved more important. For Germany the defence of Poznań was a typical example of Hitler’s “fortress” strategy: well over ten thousand soldiers, wounded and civilians were sacrificed to delay the enemy by a few weeks. Other cities declared fortresses met a similar fate in those weeks – Wrocław (Breslau), Głogów (Glogau) and Kołobrzeg (Kolberg).

For the Red Army, Poznań was the last major test of urban warfare before Berlin. Chuikov also commanded the 8th Guards Army in the Berlin operation, which began on 16 April 1945, and on 2 May he accepted the surrender of the garrison of the Reich capital at his headquarters. Mattern went into Soviet captivity. Gauleiter Arthur Greiser, who had left Poznań on 20 January, before the city was cut off, was arrested by the Americans after the war and handed over to Poland. The Supreme National Tribunal sentenced him to death in Poznań, and on 21 July 1946 the sentence was carried out in public on the slopes of the Citadel – where the battle for the city had ended.

The rebuilding of Poznań took many years; the Old Market Square with its town hall was reconstructed in the 1950s. The Citadel was turned into a park, and on its slopes were laid out a cemetery for Soviet soldiers (PL), the Cytadelowcy cemetery and war cemeteries for British, Polish and other soldiers. On the anniversary of the end of the fighting, 23 February, the city holds ceremonies in memory of the fallen.