Heinrici replaces Himmler

On Tuesday 20 March 1945 Adolf Hitler agreed that Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler should give up command of Army Group Vistula – the formation defending the front on the lower and middle Oder, facing Soviet bridgeheads less than 80 kilometres from Berlin. His successor was Colonel General Gotthard Heinrici, until then commander of the 1st Panzer Army on the borders of Silesia and Moravia, who was regarded in the Wehrmacht as one of its greatest experts in defensive warfare. The change ended Hitler’s failed experiment, which had lasted less than two months, of entrusting an army group to a man who had never commanded troops in the field.

The Reichsführer-SS at the front

Army Group Vistula was formed at the end of January 1945, when the Red Army’s great winter offensive had smashed the German defences on the Vistula and a gap had opened between East Prussia and Silesia that reached as far as Pomerania and the Oder. The Chief of the Army General Staff, Colonel General Heinz Guderian, wanted the new formation, which was to close the gap, to be given to the experienced Field Marshal Maximilian von Weichs. Hitler, however, chose Himmler – head of the SS and the police, Minister of the Interior and, since July 1944, also commander of the Replacement Army. After the 20 July plot the dictator trusted his generals less and less and was increasingly willing to hand military tasks to men from the SS. Himmler had already had a brief spell in command of Army Group Upper Rhine, whose attacks in Alsace – including Operation Sonnenwende near Strasbourg – had brought no lasting gains.

On the Oder and in Pomerania, Himmler’s lack of experience told badly. For a long time the new army group existed largely on paper: it was made up of the remnants of shattered divisions, training units, Volkssturm battalions and improvised battle groups. Participants’ memoirs describe a staff without maps or communications of its own, and the Reichsführer himself organising his day according to the habits of a civil servant, with long breaks for rest and massage. Himmler responded to defeats in the only way he knew: with orders to hold on at all costs, with drumhead courts martial and with the execution of soldiers and officers deemed to be cowards.

On 31 January troops of Marshal Georgy Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front seized bridgeheads on the west bank of the Oder near Kienitz and Kostrzyn (Küstrin). In mid-February Army Group Vistula launched the only major attack in its history, from the Stargard area – Operation Sonnenwende. After a fierce row with Hitler on 13 February, Guderian secured agreement that it would in practice be directed by his deputy, General Walther Wenck, and not by Himmler; within a few days the attack stalled, and Wenck was badly injured in a car accident. The counter-stroke did, however, confirm the Soviet command in its belief that Pomerania had to be cleared before the march on Berlin.

Defeat in Pomerania

On 10 February 1945 Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky’s 2nd Belorussian Front attacked, and at the end of the month Zhukov too drove into Western Pomerania. The front of Army Group Vistula was split: on 4–5 March Soviet troops reached the Baltic near Koszalin (Köslin) and Kołobrzeg (Kolberg), cutting off the 2nd Army, which fell back towards Gdynia and Gdańsk. In the weeks that followed one town after another fell; Kołobrzeg, defended by the Germans to the very end, was taken on 18 March by the Polish 1st Army. The remnants of the 3rd Panzer Army – commanded since 9 March by General Hasso von Manteuffel – were still holding a bridgehead opposite Szczecin (Stettin), at Dąbie (Altdamm); it was evacuated on 19–20 March, as the East Pomeranian offensive drew to its close.

The defeat in Pomerania undermined what remained of Himmler’s credibility as a commander. Increasingly depressed, in mid-March the Reichsführer left the army group’s headquarters in a forest near Prenzlau and went to the SS sanatorium at Hohenlychen near Lychen, run by his friend the SS doctor Karl Gebhardt. Officially he was suffering from influenza or a cold. Historians – following Guderian and the staff officers – take the view that the illness was at least partly diplomatic: Himmler was avoiding responsibility for a catastrophe he could not stop, and he feared Hitler’s anger.

Guderian’s role

According to Guderian’s memoirs, it was he who brought about the change. He visited Himmler at Hohenlychen and found him – as he wrote – in bed with a slight cold. He suggested that the Reichsführer, burdened with so many offices, could not also command an army group, and proposed that he resign of his own accord. Himmler did not dare raise the matter with Hitler in person and asked Guderian to do it for him. Hitler accepted the proposal reluctantly, but agreed. Guderian’s candidate was Heinrici, and Hitler – who disliked the general and had earlier removed him from command – this time raised no objection. Guderian’s account must be read with caution, since he wrote it after the war in his own defence, but other sources confirm it on the essential points.

Heinrici arrived at the army group’s headquarters near Prenzlau on 22 March. According to accounts collected by Cornelius Ryan, Himmler greeted him with a long, rambling lecture on his own achievements, interrupted only by a telephone call from the commander of the 9th Army with news of a crisis at Kostrzyn. Shortly afterwards Himmler left. He held no further military command for the rest of the war; in April he was occupied above all with secret talks with Count Folke Bernadotte, for which Hitler stripped him of all his offices in the last days of the war.

A specialist in defence

Gotthard Heinrici, a pastor’s son born in 1886 in Gumbinnen in East Prussia, was an officer of the old Prussian school: sparing with words, religious, averse to propaganda posturing. He made his name in the winter of 1941–1942 when, after the Soviet counter-offensive at Moscow, he took command of the shattered 4th Army in January 1942 and stabilised its front. It was then that he developed the method that became his trademark: just before an expected artillery preparation he would pull his infantry back from the first line to the second, so that the Soviet fire fell on empty trenches, and then send his men back into the fight. In the autumn of 1943 his army held off attacks near Orsha for a long time. Heinrici repeatedly demanded that the front be shortened; in June 1944, just before Operation Bagration, he was removed from command. In the summer of 1944 he took over the 1st Panzer Army, with which he held up the Soviet advance at the Dukla Pass and in the Carpathians.

The image of Heinrici as a “decent” general needs qualifying. His letters and diaries from 1941–1942, published by the historian Johannes Hürter, show an officer who approved of the war in the East and of the “Commissar Order”, while doubting Hitler’s strategy more and more. His armies, like the whole of Army Group Centre, fought partisans with methods that struck at the civilian population, and in the retreats of 1943 they devastated and depopulated the areas they withdrew from. The oft-repeated story that Heinrici refused to burn Smolensk rests mainly on his own accounts.

The Oder front

Heinrici took over an army group made up of two armies: Manteuffel’s 3rd Panzer Army on the lower Oder, from the Szczecin Lagoon to the area of Hohensaaten, and General Theodor Busse’s 9th Army on the sector from Hohensaaten to the mouth of the Lusatian Neisse, where Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner’s Army Group Centre began. Facing them was Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front, which in March, after the end of the fighting in Western Pomerania, was moving its armies back to the Oder, while in the north Rokossovsky’s 2nd Belorussian Front was to arrive once it had taken Gdańsk and Gdynia. The new commander’s first task was Kostrzyn, the fortress that barred the road from the bridgehead to Berlin. The New Town had already fallen on 12 March, and on 22 March troops of the 5th Shock Army and General Vasily Chuikov’s 8th Guards Army (PL) linked up west of the town, encircling the Old Town with its fortress and merging the two bridgeheads into one.

Hitler demanded a breakthrough to the fortress. Heinrici considered the attack hopeless but had to carry it out: on 22 and 27 March the 9th Army attacked from the Frankfurt and Seelow areas, each time with heavy losses and without success. According to the American historian Earl Ziemke, the attack of 27 March alone cost the Germans about 8,000 killed and wounded. At a conference in the Reich Chancellery on 28 March Hitler blamed Busse for the failure; Guderian defended him vigorously and that same day was sent on six weeks’ “sick leave”. His place was taken by General Hans Krebs. On the night of 29–30 March the fortress commander, SS-Gruppenführer Heinz Reinefarth – the same man who in August 1944 had directed the massacre in Wola during the Warsaw Uprising – broke out with the remnants of the garrison to the German lines, against Hitler’s orders. Kostrzyn was taken on 30 March, almost completely destroyed.

The plan to defend the Seelow Heights

After the fall of Kostrzyn, Heinrici concentrated on preparing the defence against the offensive which, as everyone understood, would be launched against Berlin within a few weeks. He judged that the Soviet bridgehead could no longer be eliminated and decided to make use of the one asset he had left: the terrain. Beyond the marshy Oder valley (the Oderbruch) rose the edge of the Seelow Heights, on which the 9th Army built a second, main line of defence, with further positions farther west. Heinrici intended to repeat his method from Moscow: at the last moment before the artillery preparation he would withdraw his troops from the first line, so that the Soviet fire would strike empty ground. He also demanded that Hitler return the panzer divisions that had been transferred south to Schörner – in vain.

The plan partly worked. When the Berlin offensive began on 16 April, Zhukov’s attack stuck fast at Seelow for three days before his armies broke through the defences. Heinrici, however, had no intention of defending Berlin itself: he refused to detach troops for fighting in the city, did not pass on to his subordinates the orders to destroy infrastructure, and in the last days of April withdrew his armies to the west and north-west, against orders. On 28–29 April Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel relieved him of his command; he was to be replaced by General Kurt Student. Part of the 9th Army was destroyed or captured in the Halbe pocket, while the rest of the army group made its way towards the Elbe to surrender to the Americans and the British.

The significance of the change

Army Group Vistula is often presented as the formation that stood in the way of the Soviet march on Berlin. That is true, with one qualification: in April two fronts advanced on Berlin, and Marshal Ivan Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front, which burst into the city from the south, attacked from the Neisse against the positions of Schörner’s Army Group Centre, not Heinrici’s.

The replacement of Himmler by Heinrici was one of the last displays of common sense in the command of the Third Reich, but it could not change the outcome of the war. It also showed the limits of an experiment in which Hitler entrusted the front to men who were loyal rather than competent. Himmler, who had taken over the army group in January as the second man in the state, was by March politically discredited; within a few weeks he would be seeking an understanding with the Western Allies on his own account. Guderian, the last chief of staff who dared to argue with Hitler, lost his post a week later. Heinrici, a commander with no illusions about the outcome, prepared on the Oder the Wehrmacht’s last great defensive battle on the Eastern Front – a battle that held up the Red Army for a few days but did not save Berlin.