The Face of Disaster

Early one morning last week some 70 haggard German soldiers climbed out of a sand pit on the edge of Minsk's ancient Jewish cemetery, whose gravestones glared at them in silent reproach. The Red armies had overrun Minsk four days before, and were now rolling on far to the west, but the 70 Germans did not know that. They thought Minsk was still held by the Wehrmucht. When they started into the city, the Russian garrison mowed them down to the last man.

This ill-fated detachment had been sent out to reconnoiter for 5,000 to 7,000 German troops, the remnants of several battered divisions which had been cut off in the woods east of Minsk. Their communications had been so completely severed that they no longer knew where the fighting front was.

Their plight was part of the picture of the German disaster on the Eastern Front--a disaster which could not be wholly stated in terms of miles and pins on a map, of casualties and booty, of numbers of "populated places" retaken by the Russians. There were other eloquent little vignettes:

P: U.S. and British correspondents riding out of Minsk in jeeps saw mounted guerrillas with saddles made in Germany. Holland and Hungary.

P: One roadside area was littered with the wreckage of 600 German vehicles--staff cars, trucks, gun limbers, amphibious vehicles, big mobile cranes and antitank artillery. After running into a Red artillery roadblock, the Germans had tried to turn around in search of a detour.

Then Stormoviks came over and strafed them with bombs, cannon and machine-gun fire. Many drivers turned off the road and blew up in their own mine fields.

Others were killed by gasoline fires, by their own exploding ammunition.

P: Russian-born Writer Maurice Hindus saw "a long column of captured Germans shuffling along. . . . Unwashed, unshaven and ragged, they barely dragged their feet over the dusty, rutted ground. Among them was a lieutenant colonel. 'We had no food, no ammunition,' he said. 'Our position was hopeless.' Yet all around I saw large stores of German ammunition. It lay in neatly arranged tiers, sometimes camouflaged . . . sometimes as open as the fields."

The Questions. These small glimpses helped to clarify disaster on the grand scale. But they did not explain every thing. The Germans knew they were short of manpower and materials of many crucial kinds, especially airplanes, tanks and fuel. They knew the Soviet offensive was coming. Had they properly sounded the depths of their own weakness, accurately measured the potential of Soviet power?

If they had known their defenses would collapse like a framework of overstrained girders at the touch of a cutting torch, why had they not pulled clear out of the Baltic countries and eastern Poland, to a shortened line from Konigsberg through Bialystok and Brest-Litovsk to Kovel?

Such a line, north of the Carpathians, would have enabled them to double the available manpower in depth.

If they hoped to gain time, what conceivable alleviation could time bring?

Could Adolf Hitler--the man who insists on holding the enemy as far as possible from the Reich--still prevail against the prudence of his general staff and his field commanders?

It might be thought that the German armies were sick with the self-distilled poisons of a whole nation in travail, of a nation fed on doubt and defeatism, cramped by material and moral starvation. If that was so, why did the Wehrmacht seem so much sicker in Russia than in Italy and Normandy? Was it that the Russians had diagnosed the sick ness more accurately than the Western Allies, been more willing to take chances exploiting the German weakness?

The Facts. However these questions may eventually be answered, the fact remained that the German line, which less than a month ago bulged far into White Russia, now bellied even farther the other way, toward Germany. At Vilna, the Russians were 220 miles from the starting line of their offensive only 18 days ago.

At Vilna, they were less than 100 miles from East Prussia. If the Germans north of the gap between Vilna and Konigsberg failed to get down through it before the Russians closed it, there would be no Dunkirk, no escape by sea, for them.

They lacked the ships and air cover.

While 36-year-old General Chernyakhovsky's infantry troops battled Germans in the streets of Vilna, his tanks and cavalry bypassed the city, ripped into Lithuania.

To the north, Marshal Bagramian began an encirclement of Dvinsk in Latvia. To the south, Marshal Rokossovsky captured the key junction of Baranovichi, whose railroads lead to Vilna, Bialystok and Brest-Litovsk. In the treacherous Pripet Marshes, other Rokossovsky forces skirted the bogs along road and rail embankments, captured Luninets and attacked Pinsk.

There were signs that the front south of the marshes was at last coming to life.

The Germans announced that they had evacuated Kovel, that Marshal Georgy K. Zhukov's armies had advanced to the Bug River, between Kovel and Lublin, had thus penetrated "the Government General of Poland" (i.e., crossed the Russian-German, partition line of 1939). It was here, on the southern Polish plains, that the Germans had feared the heaviest Rus sian blows.

The Master Race. It is a sadly beaten and demoralized army that leaves dead generals on the battlefield. East of Minsk, among 5,000 enemy dead,, the Russians found a corpse in a general's uniform.

They could not identify him. They captured three more alive--one of them a lieutenant general commanding a tank corps--bringing their total of German generals killed or captured to 14 since the offensive started. The Nazis were not even able to save their top command posts from the slashing, battering attacks of the Russians.

General Fritz Gollwitzer, a corps commander taken alive last fortnight, was brought into a peasant hut for questioning. He and his staff raised their arms in the Nazi salute. The captors stared stonily.

Said an interrogator: "After you were encircled, you knew the hopelessness of your position. Why did you continue to fight and sacrifice German lives?"

Gollwitzer: "I did this to help other German armies on other fronts. Besides, though the Russians had superiority in men and equipment, I trusted our superior fighting quality. . . . The battles are just beginning. We will talk about results when they are over."

"Do you mean that Germany will win?"

"Of course Germany will win."

"Do you still believe that Germans are the master race?"

"I am proud of being a German."

It was fair talk--for a Nazi general. But in July 1944 fair talk no longer spurred German soldiers to victory.

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