Army Group Centre

• 1. Introduction

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  Army Group Centre, known in German as Heeresgruppe Mitte, was born on the 18th of December 1940, when Adolf Hitler signed Führer Directive 21. That document ordered German forces to prepare for the destruction of Soviet Russia. Within eighteen months, the formation would command millions of men across a front stretching hundreds of kilometres. Within four years, it would be almost completely annihilated in a single summer offensive. How a force so vast could be built, wielded, and then shattered raises questions about the nature of military power on the Eastern Front. Who led it, how it fought, and what finally broke it are the threads this documentary follows.

• 2. Command and Leadership

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  Field Marshal Fedor von Bock was the first man to command Army Group Centre, taking charge when the formation was activated for Operation Barbarossa in June 1941. His tenure ended exactly one year after Hitler signed the founding directive: on the 18th of December 1941, Bock was relieved following the failure of the assault on Moscow and replaced by Field Marshal Günther von Kluge.

  Kluge held command far longer than his predecessor. He remained in place until October 1943, when an injury forced him out. Field Marshal Ernst Busch took over, but his tenure proved brief. When the catastrophe of the summer 1944 Soviet offensive made itself felt, Walter Model replaced Busch in June 1944. Model was transferred to the Western Front in August of that year, and Ferdinand Schörner took charge. Schörner would command until his desertion in May 1945, the day after Germany had already surrendered to the Allies.

• 3. Barbarossa and the Drive East

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  On the 22nd of June 1941, Nazi Germany and its Axis allies launched their invasion of the Soviet Union with armies totalling under four million men, advancing in three directions: toward Leningrad, Moscow, and Ukraine. Army Group Centre's initial assignment was not a straight charge to Moscow. The plan called for blitzkrieg movement short of the capital, then a halt, a splitting of forces, and assistance in pincer movements to the north and south, depending on results elsewhere.

  Beating the Soviet armies in Belarus and taking Smolensk were treated as near-certainties by German planners, who pointed to earlier campaigns in France, Poland, Greece, Yugoslavia, the Low Countries, Norway, and Denmark. That confidence was tested almost immediately. Bitter fighting at the Battle of Smolensk, combined with a policy dispute known as the Lötzen decision, delayed Army Group Centre's advance by two months. Hitler then compounded the delay by ordering the offensive against Moscow postponed altogether, insisting on the conquest of Ukraine first.

• 4. The Battle of Moscow and Rzhev

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  The push toward Moscow finally resumed in autumn 1941, with Army Group Centre fielding multiple panzer groups and armies converging from different angles. The attempt failed. By December, the Soviets had halted the advance and launched counterattacks that forced the Germans onto the defensive around the salient near Rzhev.

  1942 opened with Soviet forces pressing hard around Rzhev. The German Ninth Army managed to hold its positions and stabilise the front, despite large-scale partisan activity in its rear areas. While German strategic attention shifted to the southwest with the launch of Operation Blue in June 1942, Army Group Centre kept fighting. Soviet units that had penetrated behind German lines during the winter offensives were not fully eliminated until July. The largest Soviet operation against Army Group Centre that year, Operation Mars, came in November, launched at the same time as Operation Uranus, the counteroffensive at Stalingrad. Operation Mars was repulsed with very heavy Soviet losses, though it succeeded in tying down German units that might otherwise have been sent south to the Stalingrad fighting.

• 5. Anti-Partisan Warfare Behind the Lines

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  While the frontline battles drew most of the historical attention, the rear areas of Army Group Centre were the site of systematic and lethal anti-partisan operations throughout the occupation. Operation Bamberg ran from the 26th of March to the 6th of April 1942, conducted south of Bobruisk by the 707th Infantry Division supported by a Slovakian regiment. At least 5,000 people were killed, including many civilians, and agricultural produce was confiscated.

  Operation Fruhlingsfest, conducted from the 17th of April to the 12th of May 1944 in the Polotsk area by units of Gruppe von Gottberg, recorded around 7,000 deaths at German hands. Operation Kormoran, which ran from the 25th of May to the 17th of June 1944 between Minsk and Borisov, was carried out by German security units behind the Third Panzer Army and recorded around 7,500 deaths. As partisan coordination increased, the Soviets launched Operation Concert as a direct response to these German rear-area campaigns.

• 6. Operation Bagration and Destruction

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  On the 22nd of June 1944, the third anniversary of the German invasion, the Soviet High Command launched Operation Bagration. The date was deliberate. The attacking force comprised 185 Red Army divisions with 2.3 million soldiers, 4,000 tanks and assault guns, striking Army Group Centre across a front 200 kilometres wide.

  Army Group Centre at that moment numbered around 850,000 men. Soviet planners had spent the spring running a deception campaign to convince the Wehrmacht that the main summer offensive would fall further south, against Army Group North Ukraine. German commanders were fooled, and armoured units were moved away from the centre precisely before the blow landed. The result was catastrophic. Over 450,000 Germans were killed, wounded, or captured. Among the captured were 57,000 soldiers taken east of Minsk, who were paraded through Moscow on the 17th of July 1945 on Stalin's orders as a demonstration of Soviet success. By mid-July Soviet forces had liberated Minsk and the rest of Belorussia. By early August they had reached the Vistula and the Baltic States. In terms of casualties, this was the greatest German defeat of the entire war.

• 7. Final Battles and Surrender

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  In January 1945 the formation that bore the name Army Group Centre was renamed Army Group North, and the designation passed to what had been Army Group A, so a second Army Group Centre came into existence to fight the final campaigns in Slovakia, Bohemia-Moravia, and sections of the German heartland. Between January and February 1945, this formation sustained 140,000 casualties: 15,000 dead, 77,000 wounded, and 48,000 missing.

  Ferdinand Schörner commanded during the Battle of Berlin phase, with his front including the river Neisse. Before dawn on the 16th of April 1945, the 1st Ukrainian Front under General Konev opened the attack across the Neisse with a bombardment by tens of thousands of artillery pieces. Some elements of Army Group Centre continued to resist until the 11th of May 1945, three days after Germany's formal surrender, when the overwhelming force of Soviet armies sent to liberate Czechoslovakia in the Prague Offensive left them no choice. By the 7th of May, the German Armed Forces High Command had not heard from Schörner since the 2nd of May. He had told subordinates he intended to fight westward and surrender to the Americans. On the 8th of May a colonel from Allied Forces High Command was escorted through American lines to meet him; Schörner ordered his men to observe the surrender but admitted he could not guarantee compliance. Later that same day he deserted, flew to Austria, and was arrested by the Americans on the 18th of May 1945.