For the Germans any hope of a military solution bordered on the delusional, yet even now the generals continued to play their assigned role in Hitler’s Götterdämmerung. Although no rational person could be in doubt about the final outcome of the battle, the Germans remained determined to exact a high price for their defeat. The OKW had stripped much of the western front in order to assemble some eighty-five divisions and Volkssturm units for the final struggle in the east. Although old men, untrained boys, soldiers recovering from wounds, and those previously classified as physically unfit composed the great majority of the manpower in these units, they were surrounded by a core of hardened veterans that significantly increased their combat power. In addition, Speer’s effort to squeeze the last bit out of the German war economy meant that these men were generally well equipped with small arms, including large numbers of the Panzerfaust, the devastating short-range antitank weapon. Moreover, the Germans could still field large numbers of tanks and aircraft, although severe fuel shortages crippled their effectiveness. Of more immediate help was the transfer of large numbers of flak units to the Oder front, where they would employ their powerful eighty-eight-millimeter guns as antitank weapons.31
Perhaps most importantly, the German retreat had shortened the lines considerably, which meant that they would now have sufficient manpower to build and at least partially man three successive lines of defense. Indeed, correctly anticipating the main axis of the enemy attack, the Germans had constructed an elaborate defense in depth on the central Oder consisting of three positions stretching some twenty miles to the rear, or halfway to Berlin. Each of these lines, moreover, contained up to three separate belts of trenches, fortified strongpoints, antitank obstacles and ditches, flak gun emplacements, and dense mine-fields. During the spectacular campaigns of 1944 and early 1945, the Soviets had grown accustomed to piercing relatively lightly manned front positions, then exploiting their superior mobility, not only to shatter the enemy front, but also to prevent any new defense from being established. Now, however, the Red Army no longer had any maneuver room since Berlin was only forty miles away and the Americans not more than a hundred miles to the west. Instead, the Soviets faced the unpleasant task of fighting a series of penetration battles against successive, fully manned, well-equipped positions whose defenders could be expected to put up fierce resistance. Furthermore, the flat Polish countryside that had favored a mobile attacker had now been replaced by terrain much more suitable for defense. The so-called Oderbruch, the floodplain on the western side of the river that stretched up to ten miles in depth, was a low-lying, marshy area crisscrossed by numerous small streams and drainage ditches, largely devoid of trees or any natural cover, containing many towns and villages that could be turned into strongpoints. Not only would it be difficult for infantry or heavy tanks to traverse this region, but also, once across it, the high bluffs, especially the Seelow Heights, afforded superb positions from which the defenders could make effective use of all their weapons. If, then, Hitler retained any glimmer of hope, it rested on a successful defensive battle that would finally exhaust the Russians, although even here General Busse, the commander of the defending Ninth Army, had a clearer perspective. “Even if American and British tanks slammed into our rear,” he indicated, his men were to contest every step of the Russians westward in order to do their “soldierly duty” to their people.32
Neither side remained passive as the Soviets built their strength for the inevitable assault on Berlin. In order to prevent the Germans from transferring forces to the Oder front, the Soviets remained active in Hungary and Silesia; both served, as well, to distract Hitler’s attention from the main threat. To gain better jumping-off points, the Russians also hammered throughout March at expanding and uniting their various bridgeheads across the Oder, while the Germans resisted just as determinedly. The focal point of the March battles soon became the fortress of Küstrin, at the confluence of the Warthe and Oder Rivers. For a variety of reasons, ranging from the historical to the tactical, Hitler was soon obsessed with holding on to the city, which resulted in a wearying, weeks-long contest that the Germans could not win. At his insistence, they even mounted a late March counterattack from Frankfurt/Oder in order to relieve the besieged city. Although it caught the Soviets by surprise and even reached the outskirts of Küstrin, the attack, which could not possibly have altered the balance of forces, rapidly lost momentum, with the only result a waste of scarce German forces. Amazingly, even at this late date, Hitler could not accept the inability of the Wehrmacht to win operational victories or the fact that the enemy now dictated events. Seething with anger, and searching for a scapegoat, the Führer found him in one of his few remaining rational military leaders, Heinz Guderian. Having vigorously defended the actions of the commanders involved in the Küstrin attack, the field marshal now once more felt Hitler’s wrath, being given on 28 March six weeks “sick leave.” Although Hitler would have preferred no OKH chief of staff or to surround himself with old free-booting Freikorps types, he nonetheless named General Hans Krebs, a young firebrand, acting chief of staff. Küstrin fell on the thirtieth, an action that brought to a close the grinding March battles along the Oder that had cost both sides dearly.33
With the preliminaries resolved, the Stavka could now finalize its plans for the Berlin Operation. Painfully aware of history, of examples of Russian armies denied certain victory because of overconfidence and poor preparation, it was determined to make this the last offensive of the war. Following an impressively rapid redeployment of troops, the Soviets were able to assemble a force of 2.5 million men, 6,250 tanks, and 7,500 aircraft in the three fronts participating in the assault. In order to ensure a breakthrough on the first day of the attack, Zhukov not only created special shock groups but also demanded an extensive tactical concentration of forces, with the result that enormously large numbers of men and equipment were crammed into a very narrow front. In this way, he hoped literally to shove his way through German defenses, but, in the event, he managed only to make a mockery of the Schwerpunkt principle, as the first day would show. Although the Soviets estimated enemy forces at 1 million, with almost 800,000 combat troops, this proved a gross exaggeration of their actual firepower since a sizable percentage of the defenders were Volkssturm battalions or hastily assembled units of undertrained boys. At the beginning of April, the Ninth Army, for example, which would bear the brunt of the attack, reported its strength at around 190,000 men, of whom fewer than 100,000 were regarded as combat troops. To its north, the Third Panzer Army fared no better; on 1 April, it had a daily strength of 51,406 men, with only 27,595 front soldiers. Army Group Vistula, facing the First and Second Belorussian Fronts, had fewer than 800 operational tanks and assault guns, while the Luftwaffe could muster perhaps 1, 600 operational aircraft, although the chronic shortage of fuel hindered the effectiveness of both tanks and aircraft. To bolster their defenses, the Germans had managed to designate a pitifully few divisions as a reserve, while the leadership of the Hitler Youth had trained 6,000 boys for specially created Panzernahkampfeinheit (tank close combat units). Their task, as the name suggested, was to destroy enemy tanks at close range, not an activity designed to ensure a long life. Nonetheless, on 12 April, Hitler announced that he expected a “colossal” victory since nowhere else in Germany was a front so strongly held or well supplied. That the enemy had an even greater concentration of force and that the German supply of munitions was good for only a few days were facts that he ignored.34