Beyond Barbarossa: The Eastern Front of World War 2 · Scott Bury

Into Germany—Episode 92 of the first podcast to focus on the full story of the Eastern Front of World War 2

·44 min·2 clips

On 27 January, the 60th Army liberated Auschwitz, including Birkenau and Monowitz.

The episode begins on 27 January with Soviet troops reaching Auschwitz. A reconnaissance patrol from the 107th Rifle Division comes out of a snowbound forest and finds the camp after the SS has tried to erase traces of the murder system. Just over a week earlier, 58,000 inmates deemed capable of walking were forced westward from Auschwitz, while those who survived this death march were dumped in other concentration camps where squalor, starvation, and disease only got worse in the final months of the war. Dr. Mengele takes his notes and leaves for Berlin. Company executives at Auschwitz III destroy their records. The gas chambers and crematoria at Birkenau are blown up. Orders are given to liquidate prisoners too ill to move, but the SS kills only a couple of hundred out of the 8,000 left behind. The episode does not stay there. It moves into the winter campaign of 1945, where the German habit of declaring cities festung and ordering them held to the last creates high-casualty traps without changing the outcome. That had already failed elsewhere. The narration points back to Bobroisk, Courland, and Vilnius in 1944, and to other cities on the Western Front as well, to show that the tactic repeatedly spent German lives without stopping the Red Army or the Allies. Hindsight does not help the men on the ground. The episode stresses that in January 1945 no one could know how long the war would last or whether they would survive the next day, which is why the orders carried such weight even when they made little sense. Warsaw becomes the next anchor point. On 16 January, Colonel Boguslaw von Bonnen of the German Army General Staff gives Army Group A permission to withdraw from Warsaw, directly overriding Hitler's festung order, and Hitler has him arrested and sent to Dachau until the US Army liberates the camp in May 1945. Meanwhile, Zhukov's first Belorussian Front keeps moving. The 2nd Guards Tank Army and the 5th Shock Army reach the Oder River by the end of the month, and one unit of the 5th Shock Army crosses the frozen river to take Kienitz on 31 January. South of them, Lodz falls on 19 January. Then the 1st Guards Tank Army encircles Poznan on 25 January, beginning a month-long siege because Hitler has declared the city a fortress that must be held without retreat. Most of the Red Army sweeps past Poznan, leaving the 1st Guards Tank Army and the 8th Guards Army to handle it while the broader offensive races west toward Germany. The result is a hard, chronological account of the Eastern Front closing in on the Reich. It suits listeners who want operational detail, geographical orientation, and a blunt view of how the war's final months looked from the Soviet and German sides.

As heard by us

A hard, map-driven account of the Red Army's final push into Germany.

It begins at Auschwitz on 27 January 1945, when a reconnaissance patrol from the 107th Rifle Division found the camp after the SS had forced 58,000 inmates west a little over a week earlier and tried to destroy the evidence.

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Why you'd press play

Follow the Red Army from Auschwitz to the Oder, one grim step at a time.

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