'Hitler Fortresse's in the East'
Research in the Soviet archives reveals the desperate battles to overcome Nazi redoubts in Eastern Europe
‘Fortresses must carry out the same tasks as the fortresses of old… They must allow themselves to be surrounded and thus tie down as many enemy forces as possible.’ Hitler conceived of his ‘Festung’ as heavily defended citadels where his forces would fight to the death. There was no realistic prospect that they would be relieved - unless the fantasies about ‘miracle weapons’ turning the tide of war were believed. Yet he was able to establish a series of locations where the Red Army were forced to confront heavily defended bastions of resistance - where even innovative tactics could not prevent heavy casualties. Hitler's Fortresses in the East: The Sieges of Ternopil', Kovel', Poznan and Breslau, 1944–1945 relies on extensive contemporary records to describe fighting that was at least as bloody and destructive as at Stalingrad.
The following excerpt covers the second stage of the attack on Poznan that began on the 1st February 1945:
By 1 February the Soviet units were fighting for the city centre. At this time Himmler became the commander of Army Group Vistula. One of his first acts as army group commander was his appointment of a new commandant for Poznan. General Gonell, the commander of the previously-mentioned officers’ school in Poznan, replaced General Mattern. One may evaluate Himmler’s capabilities as a military commander in various ways, but his decision as regards the commandant of Poznan definitely altered the fate of the fortress itself and its garrison.
During the first days of the assault on Poznan the Soviet forces assaulted or blockaded the comparatively modem forts, which had appeared during the age of rifled artillery, along the outer ring. The shift of combat operations to the centre of the city led the Soviet forces to older, but still quite strong fortifications. Ancient walls and bastions, which had been built during the early stages of the fortress’s construction, covered the old city from the south and west. The Soviet offensive was halted for a time along this line.
For the assault on Bastion III (‘Grolman’) (this should not be confused with the outer ring’s Fort VIII of the same name), an assault group consisting of fifty infantrymen and twenty guns of various calibres up to 203mm, was formed from the 74th Rifle Division’s 226th Guards Rifle Regiment. One 203mm howitzer (the first such gun deployed in the city, to judge by all accounts), was to punch a hole in the bastion’s wall by direct fire at a range of 300m. During the night of 1/2 February, before the assault, the infantry fired on the bastion’s embrasures, to cover the gun being brought into position to fire directly at the fort.
Powerful 152mm guns were brought up by Studebaker trucks and then manhandled into position. The 203mm gun was moved to its position only once the artillery preparation had begun, already armed,2’ after which it was set up in ten minutes in a previously-prepared pit. The bastion had already been heavily damaged and the upper comer towers had been destroyed. The 203mm gun fired seven rounds against the fort’s walls, making two breaches each more than a metre wide. When the fire from the guns was halted by a signal from the regimental commander, flamethrower troops moved forward and let loose several blasts from their weapons into the bastion’s embrasures and into the holes in the wall and set fire to the interior. The bastion burned and ammunition exploded inside. The infantry rose to the attack and before long had seized the entire complex of buildings situated around it.
However, the difficulties of the assault did not cease upon overcoming the city walls. The complexity of the offensive in the central part of the city was conditioned by the presence of a large number of multi-storey buildings - more than a third of all military and industrial establishments were located in the centre. The overwhelming majority of buildings in the centre were of old brickwork or stone (granite), with walls up to a metre thick and more. All of the buildings had basements, which were linked together below ground. The centre was also a maze of narrow streets and alleys. Gonell, who had taken personal control of the garrison, was able to restore the integrity of the city’s defence following the loss of its south-western part by regrouping forces between sectors.
The fighting for the city blocks immediately revealed the inapplicability of the usual methods of fighting in Poznan. The Germans occupied the corner buildings, from which they were able sweep four sides of the streets with fire. The difficulty of the offensive for the Soviet units in the city quarters was that:
the enemy did not give the infantry the opportunity to attack with machine-gun and automatic rifle fire;
the artillery was also unable to fire from open positions in light of the danger of their crews being hit by enemy fire;
artillery fire from concealed positions was also made difficult due to the buildings shielding each other;
armoured vehicles were hit by Faustpatrone rounds.
The general principle of the attack was the sequence of the artillery working over the objective, firing on it from heavy and light machine guns and then breaking into the building through windows, doors and holes in the walls in small groups. The troops sought to cover themselves against flanking fire with smokescreens. Tanks and self-propelled guns operated at high speed, bombarding firing points in the lower floors, while flamethrower tanks set fire to the buildings.
The task of the assault troops was eased only to a certain extent by the seizing of the defensive perimeter. The garrison had employed all their artillery and mortars along the outer ring of the city’s defence. Accordingly, when the Soviet troops broke into the centre the defenders’ artillery became the attackers’ trophies. For the Germans the main means of fighting in the city became infantry weapons and Faustpatronen, which the garrison had in abundance. It’s sufficient to point out that upon the conclusion of the assault the Red Army captured 19,000 Faustpatronen. It was precisely during this period that Soviet documents indicate counter-attacks in approximately company strength, supported by four to six self-propelled guns. Soviet experts also noted the widespread employment of snipers by the enemy.
A large role in the assault was played by FOG30 flamethrowers, which became standard in assaulting fortresses during the final months of the war. However, their employment required certain precautions. For example, in setting up flamethrowers in a building, particularly an entire battery, from the second floor and up, one had to take into account the sturdiness of the floors. The FOGs had a powerful recoil and could break through a weak floor while firing and set fire to the building they were in. Setting up FOGs in the street required the cover of either darkness or smoke. In Poznan, FOG batteries used a non-standard procedure of first firing unlit fuel which spread throughout the target and then a burst of lit fuel which ignited all the fuel that had seeped into every comer of the building.
One of the means of advance in the city was blowing up obstacles by combat engineers. For example, while assaulting the thirtieth block, the 27th Guards Rifle Division’s 83rd Guards Rifle Regiment needed to take a building that covered the entrance into it. All the approaches to the building were enfiladed from the neighbouring buildings. However, a blind wall which led to the objective remained unoccupied. The buildings stood in a row, facing each other with blind walls, without windows or doors.
Upon entering a neighbouring unoccupied building through the basement, the combat engineers blew a 1m x 1.5m hole in the blind wall with a 35kg charge. They then threw smoke grenades into the hole and onto the street and made their way to the blind wall of the building under attack under the cover of the smoke. They blew it up with a 40kg charge. An assault group broke into the building through the gap and, as a result of a grenade fight, threw the enemy out of the upper storeys. As a result of this thrust, the enemy’s covering fire on the entire street was disrupted, which enabled them to run over to the unoccupied buildings and take the entire block.
© Alexey V. Isaev 2021, 'Hitler's Fortresses in the East: The Sieges of Ternopol', Kovel', Poznan and Breslau, 1944–1945'. Reproduced courtesy of Pen & Sword Publishers Ltd.