With the Germans strained to the breaking point in both the north and the south, on the morning of 14 January Zhukov unleashed his First Belorussian Front from the Magnuszew and Pulawy bridgeheads south of Warsaw. Similar to Konev’s successful effort to the south, after a twenty-five-minute artillery barrage, Zhukov’s forces launched a series of powerful probing attacks on the forward German positions, followed by the main assault. Even though Zhukov planned to engage his mobile forces only on the second and third days of the attack in order to generate momentum, the power of the Soviet onslaught so unhinged the Ninth Army’s defenses that, by the end of the first day, the Russians in the Magnuszew bridgehead had advanced up to seven miles and the gains at Pulawy were even more impressive. The next day, the Soviets shattered a determined counterattack by the Nineteenth and Twenty-fifth Panzer Divisions and achieved an operational breakthrough. While Russian armored units began their drive toward Lodz, eighty miles northwest of Magnuszew, units of the First Polish Army moved north to encircle Warsaw, in combination with forces of the Soviet Forty-seventh Army that had pushed across the Vistula at Modlin, north of the capital. On the sixteenth, Hitler reacted in typical fashion to the brewing disaster, sacking the hapless commander of Army Group A, General Joseph Harpe, and replacing him with the ubiquitous Ferdinand Schörner. At the same time, he issued a completely delusory directive that Army Group A should not only hold a line from east of Krakow to Warsaw and Modlin but also attack and destroy or throw back the enemy all along the line—even though it could expect no reinforcements for two weeks. Despite the Führer’s will, however, the next day Polish forces seized Warsaw with virtually no opposition, an action that touched off an explosion in Berlin. Hitler immediately suspected that the OKH had sabotaged his orders, on the eighteenth ordering the arrest of the three senior officers at Operations Branch, and the next day signing an order that effectively directed all commanders down to the division level to get permission from him for any operational movement, whether attack or withdrawal.9
The energetic and ruthless Schörner quickly emulated his Führer by getting rid of various commanders and issuing orders that exuded will and confidence, but to no avail. By the end of the day on the eighteenth, having destroyed forward German defenses and routed their counterattacks, Soviet forces were in a headlong dash westward, with some units advancing twenty-five to thirty miles a day. Behind the front, masses of civilian refugees, and not a few stragglers from combat units, fled westward in treks that would become all too familiar. Although the Grossdeutschland Panzer Corps, sent by train from East Prussia with orders to “restore the situation,” and the remnants of the Nineteenth and Twenty-fifth Panzer Divisions tried to halt the Soviet advance near Lodz, they did little to slow Soviet momentum. By now, the Russians had steamrollered any opposition in their way and, enjoying complete aerial domination, swarmed toward the German border. The Stavka had itself been surprised by the swiftness of the collapse of Army Group A but reacted immediately and directed both Zhukov and Konev to push on to the Oder. On the nineteenth, Konev’s troops overran the Reich border in Silesia and, three days later, reached the Oder south of Breslau. Not to be outdone, Zhukov’s troops seized the industrial city of Lodz on the nineteenth, encircled Posen on the twentieth, took Bromberg (Bydgoszcz) on the twenty-first, and had reached the fortifications on the east Brandenburg border by the twenty-sixth. Four days later, these had been broken through, and, by the end of January, Zhukov’s troops had reached the Oder at Küstrin, over 240 miles from their starting point two weeks earlier. Over the first few days of February, they proceeded to establish bridgeheads across the Oder in preparation for what seemed an imminent strike at the Reich capital. Hitler reacted to this disaster, perhaps hoping to conjure something out of nothing, by renaming his army groups: Army Group Center became North, North became Courland, and A became Center. At the same time, a new army group, misleadingly named Vistula, was created under the most improbable of commanders, Heinrich Himmler, with the task of defending western Pomerania and the port city of Stettin.10
The Germans’ only success in January—itself limited—had been in East Prussia, where, in putting up fanatic resistance for a piece of strategically pointless territory, they had forced Rokossovsky’s thrust to diverge to the north and away from support of Zhukov to his south. By the twenty-fourth, however, troops from the Third Belorussian Front had pushed past Gumbinnen and threatened to cut off the Third Panzer Army in Königsberg, while forces from the Second Belorussian Front reached the coast, cutting off Army Group Center. On the afternoon of the twenty-fourth, seeing no point to the further defense of East Prussia, and hoping to save his troops in order to bring them back to Germany proper, the commander of the Fourth Army, General Friedrich Hossbach, told his corps commanders that they were to prepare for a breakout on the twenty-sixth. It was Hossbach who, as Hitler’s military adjutant in November 1937, had secretly recorded notes from a top-level conference at which Hitler had outlined his plans for expansion, notes that were soon to be used as evidence of premeditated Nazi aggression at the postwar Nuremberg Trials. Hossbach now earned a different sort of notoriety. Although his plans for a breakout directly contradicted Hitler’s orders, on the twenty-sixth, and with the knowledge of the commander of Army Group Center, General Hans Reinhardt, Hossbach nonetheless ordered his troops to attack to the west. Catching the Russians by surprise, units of the Fourth Army managed to push almost twenty miles to the west before furious enemy counterattacks halted their progress. Confronted with this clear violation of his orders, Hitler fell into a rage and ordered both Hossbach and Reinhardt relieved of their commands (although, amazingly, not of their lives). Just three decades after the great triumph at Tannenberg, which had made heroes of Hindenburg and Ludendorff, Hossbach and Reinhardt had earned only the Führer’s ire. Reinhardt was replaced by General Lothar Rendulic, an Austrian of Croatian origin who had gained notoriety for his involvement in shooting hostages in Yugoslavia in 1942. An evident clone of Schörner, Rendulic seemingly took pride in having commanders and ordinary soldiers court-martialed and shot for retreating.11