Hannibal : Konigsberg :: Dynamo : Dunkirk

The Internet is bouncing up and down like a yo-yo.  Up for two minutes, down for two.  There’s a network problem somewhere.  As a technology guy myself, I understand the fickleness of the Internet, but it’s frustrating nonetheless.  This may get published piecemeal…we’ll see…

On January 12, 1945, Russia launched its massive East Prussian Campaign.  Comprised of seven “Army Fronts”, more than 1.6 million men, and tanks and artillery pieces too numerous to count, it created a battlezone more than 500 miles long.

And it overwhelmed the 800,000 exhausted, under-supplied, and (in some cases) inexperienced German forces on the front’s other side.  In places, the Germans fell back at a staggering rate of 40 miles per day.  The Russians simply advanced faster than the Germans could retreat.

And many of those Soviet soldiers, having endured three years of German barbarity on their home soil, came westward with another goal, secondary to victory…payback.  Germans who surrendered were, in a great number of instances, simply shot.

As each town turned Red on the map, from it came citizens-turned-refugees trying to escape.  They carried with them a handful of possessions and an earful of stories, with descriptions of brutality and violence among the advancing Soviets that is too terrible to reasonably describe.  Max Hastings, one of my favorite historians, recounts in his book Armageddon that even Soviet leaders, also anxious for revenge, recoiled at the stories they were hearing and sent word down the line for their troops to exercise a little more restraint.

It had only modest effect.

Way up north, the 3rd Belorussian Front swept to the south and west, cutting off the port city of Konigsberg and, with assistance from the 2nd Belorussian Front, succeeded in isolating nearly all of East Prussia.  A steady stream of German and Prussian refugees poured into Konigsberg…and there they were stranded with their backs to the frigid Baltic.  With no way to move south towards the homeland, there was nowhere to go.

German Grand-Admiral Karl Donitz probably looked on his situation and thought back to the heady days of 1940, when the Germans had trapped the British and French at Dunkirk and victory looked close to certain.  It was a bitter pill for him to swallow, and a bitter irony that 5 years later, the roles were now reversed.  But his situation was far grimmer.  He was not facing Americans and Brits and French soldiers, who acted with relative chivalry and decency.

And so, taking a chapter from what he witnessed back in 1940, he devised an evacuation.  Operation Hannibal, as it was called, was a much more ambitious plan than Operation Dynamo, the British evacuation.  The goal was to ferry as many soldiers, officers, and civilians to either Germany or German-occupied Denmark…away from the Red Army.

Begun on January 23, 1945, the operation would last the remainder of the war.  Utilizing more than 1,000 naval and merchant ships, nearly 2,000,000 refugees in total would be evacuated from the Baltic coast…a staggering achievement considering the state of the German situation.  One vessel involved in Operation Hannibal was the Wilhelm Gustloff, and her voyage, as we learned last year, ended in disaster.

Recommended Reading: Armageddon: The Battle For Germany, 1944-1945