the Soviets were launching their massive offensive in Belorussia

In the summer of 1944, at the same time as the D-Day landings, the Soviets were launching their massive offensive in Belorussia

. It devastated Germany’s Army Group Center, and for the next few months Soviet troops ran wild. They raced west through Poland, pausing on the outskirts of Warsaw on the Vistula River in August and September to muster recourses - and also to allow the Germans to crush an uprising by the Polish resistance.

Meanwhile, the gains continued in the Balkans. In August, Soviet troops poured into Romania and overwhelmed the Germans with tanks. Romania’s figurehead King Michael led a coup that overthrew Romania’s military government. Now, Romanians who had been fighting and dying in support of Adolf Hitler’s war would be fighting and dying in support of Joseph Stalin’s war. The loss of Romania also meant more fuel shortages for the Germans.

Dominoes started to fall in southern Europe. After Romania, Bulgaria dropped out of the German alliance as well. The Soviets also moved into Yugoslavia, but much of the country was already liberated by Yugoslav Partisan fighters before the Soviets got there. This gave Yugoslavia much more freedom of action once the war was over.

The next stop was Hungary. By October, it was clear that the Russians were coming. Hungary’s military dictator, Admiral Miklos Horthy, tried to get out of the war rather than go down in total defeat alongside Hitler. Hitler would have none of that. German troops arrested Horthy, seized control of the capital, and installed a fanatical fascist as their puppet. They also murdered many of Hungary’s Jews. Nonetheless, by December 1944, the capital of Budapest was encircled by the Soviets, followed by a two-month siege that leveled much of it. In the course of fighting, Hitler wasted many of his remaining tanks in an effort to hold back the Soviets. This was men and tanks that now could not be used to defend Berlin.

. . .

All of this set up Stalin’s real offensive. The Soviet army had been building forces in central Poland on the Vistula River throughout the fall of 1944.

Stalin also worked to manipulate the personalities he had under him. His most reliable subordinate had been Georgy Zhukov, who had been an invaluable fireman, thrown into whatever situation - whether offensive or defensive - that most demanded ruthlessness and a steady hand. As the Soviets closed in on Germany, Stalin took Zhukov away from his role as a troubleshooter and instead put him in command of a single major formation: the 1st Belorussian Front, aimed squarely at the heart of Germany. At the same time, Stalin set up two potential rivals to Zhukov, both to goad him on and to detract from his fame and renown. Stalin never lost sight of the importance of undercutting a potential rival.

To Zhukov’s left, just to the south, Stalin had Ivan Konev, poorly educated but extremely tough. To Zhukov’s right, just to the north, was Konstantin Rokossovsky, who was ethnically Polish. An expert on tank warfare, Rokossovsky had been arrested and tortured as a traitor in the 1930s before being released and sent back to the Soviet army. He was never without a pistol on his person - not because he was in fear of being captured by the enemy, but by Stalin’s secret police. He told his daughter that he’d never allow himself be taken alive again.

The Soviets now had overwhelming advantages in men, tanks, and artillery, while the German forces were immobilized by fuel shortages. As the Soviets smashed through German lines in Poland - racing west out of Poland and into Germany itself - Hitler refused to pull tanks from the futile battle in Hungary to stop the Soviet advance. It’s hard to find any good reason for this decision. Scarce German Panzer divisions were being wasted to save Budapest while Soviet tanks were closing in on Germany’s capital.

With little resistance, Soviet tanks rolled 250 miles in two weeks, ending on the banks of the Oder River, only 40 miles from Berlin.

. . .

This left no doubt, in case anyone was still wondering, that Nazi Germany was on the brink of total collapse. German refugees choked the roads heading west, trying to get away from the advancing Soviet soldiers. It was the largest panic migration in history. In the two months of January and February 1945 alone, as many as 8.5 million Germans fled their homes in the eastern provinces of the Reich.

Why were they so desperate to get away? Because even if ordinary German civilians didn’t know the details of Nazi crimes, there was no doubt - from the trainloads of Jews rolling east and the stories from soldiers home on leave - that Germans had committed horrific atrocities. The Soviets were coming with revenge on their minds, and no one doubted that it would be terrible.

This took concrete form as the mass and systematic gang rape of German women commenced - including children and the elderly. Eye witness accounts from German women after the war talked about how female Soviet service members would watch and laugh as they were tortured and violated. But this wasn’t the case for all women. Natalya Gesse - a close friend of the famous Russian scientist Andrei Sakharov - was working as a Soviet war correspondent and witnessed the Red Army in action in 1945. She was horrified by what she saw. “The Russian soldiers were raping every German female from eight to eighty," she recounted later. "It was an army of rapists."

These women had not committed any crimes, but Soviet retribution was now being inflicted on them nonetheless.

To this day, the reality of the Soviet Army’s mass rapes in Germany has been repressed in Russia to such a degree that many still refuse to acknowledge what really went on - or they make excuses for it. The handful that have been willing to speak openly since the war, however, have been almost entirely unrepentant. "They all lifted their skirts for us and lay on the bed," said the leader of one tank company. He even went on to boast that "two million of our children were born” in Germany.

Altogether, it is estimated that over two million German women were raped by members of the Red Army. It is a stark reminder of how thin the veneer of civilization can be when there is no fear of retribution.

. . .

During World War I, the German army had executed 48 of its own soldiers. In World War II, the number was higher than 20,000. As the Soviets advanced west, the Germans engaged in mass public executions of their own deserting soldiers. Fanatic ideology and terror was what kept the German army going. Even as the war became hopeless, Hitler permitted no discussion of ending the bloodshed. He preferred to see the entire German nation drowned in a sea of pain if the alternative was surrender. Some 1.5 million German soldiers died in 1945 defending a lost cause, alongside hundreds of thousands of German civilians.

Hitler’s generals weren’t as sure it made sense to fight to the death. The failed assassination attempt in the summer of 1944 had been a missed opportunity. The generals now began taking subtle steps to make the best of a bad situation and salvage some hope and some future for the German people in a time after the war and after Hitler.

Given a choice, the generals strongly preferred that Germans end up in territory occupied by the British and Americans, not by the Soviets. So resistance on the Eastern Front was much more ferocious. Hitler refused - until the very end - to move troops from the West to the East. But his generals constantly worked to subvert this. Every chance they got, they sent spare units to the East to hold off the Russians. By February 1945, three times as many German soldiers were holding off the Soviet army as were fighting the British and the Americans.

. . .

For now, Zhukov and the Soviet army couldn’t push past the barrier of the Oder River. His soldiers had outrun their supplies and concentrations of German soldiers remained north and south of them. Over the next couple of months, the Soviets cleared German strongpoints out from the Baltic Sea coast and the mountains of Silesia. They moved troops and supplies forward to the Oder River, getting ready for the next big push, aimed squarely at Berlin.

Like the Sword of Damocles, the Red Army was about to fall on the German capital. There was to be no surrender. And there would be no mercy.

Pictures:

 - Soviet soldiers sexually harass a German woman in Leipzig, Germany, August 1945. (Rare Historical Photos)

 - Taking all their possessions with them (including a small house mounted on a wagon), civilians in East Prussia flee from the advancing Soviet Army. (Warfare History Network)

 - On a front nearly 1,000 miles wide, over 2.2 million Soviet soldiers, 6,400 tanks and assault guns, and 5,000 aircraft attacked westward into Poland in one of history’s largest battles. (Warfare History Network)

 - Riding atop a long column to tanks, Soviet soldiers pass through a city in East Prussia on their way to Berlin. (Warfare History Network)