Why Königsberg held off the first Attack 

Question : Can we hear more about veterans use of militia and other local units as cannon fodder? Its a tactic I use in videogames so I assumed someone during the war did it. The idea of throwing rookies into the fire rather than your best men is obviously strategically sound. Was this popular with penal battalions of all sides?

Could you please do a video on the " bahadur group " special forces of the Indian National Army in ww2

His book is on my watchlist!!

@@bigboi7817 The Russians always seem to get underestimated in that regard since while many of their generals did just throw men at problems until bullets ran out, from what I've seen some, especially later in the war, used cannonfodder tactics much more intelligently and actually used those "hopeless" first few attacks to spot weaknesses in the German defenses and the like. I wish there'd be more literature on the subject but most things written about it either seem to be generalisations from western authors about the usual soviet incompetence and lack of caring about their casualties or completely unrealistic praise from soviet historians.

@@tekis0 If you have any questions after you read it, just tag me and I'll be more than happy to answer them!

Yep.

Thanks man!

Yes. And you get a free facelift as well.

@@Davey-Boyd As a former APILAS man, I guess it’s like throwing a bowling ball out of a boat, accompanied by a very loud bang.

Sounds like a perfect example of the phrase, "Don't try this at home" xD

Schnitzels can be cooked wrapped in foil on the tubes as well. #KriegHack

You can, but only once.

He does have "Covid lockdown complexion".

seamen?

I knew he reminded me of someone, but I didn't know who.

I will ask Bas if he knows anything, but you can investigate yourself as well: www.bundesarchiv.de/EN/Navigation/Use/Using-specific-types/Searching-for-persons-and-ancestors/searching-for-persons-and-ancestors.html

@@MilitaryHistoryNotVisualized Danke 😀

The clearest example available for Königsberg talks about 420 boys in a Volkssturm unit that is incorporated in the military command structure. Only the officer and the NCOs are veterans. These boys were highly motivated and would only need a little bit of encouragement to get them to fight.

@@bastiaanwillems2252 until they start to take serious losses.

This is rather late but I feel that I can offer some insights. Because of the nature of the Organization of the German Division present at the battle of Koenigsberg, it's likely that the boys would be at a ratio of ten to one with their NCOs give or take.

Ostpreussen intensifie

Lucky

Yea, the Russians made them disappear. Happened a lot back in 45. And they had another 45 years to hide all their atrocities.

@@yuppy1967 don’t worry they made plenty of children appear in the process 0 of them by actual love

@@yuppy1967 yeah maybe because during 3 years germans did the same to them

I'm surprised that the Nazis left the statue up in the first place. They are pretty much against everything he stood for...I guess they just needed to ride his coattails to prove "German greatness".

No, the Soviets knew about the direct philosophical line (connection) between I.Kant and K.Marx, via G.W.F.Hegel !! Germany had sown the wind (also from C.Darwin, via his apostle E. Haeckle), and was reaping the whirlwind, with A.Hitler, but now from both sides !!

they didn't want to be seen as Kants ;)

Why would they destroy a statue of great Russian philosopher? :P

@Robert Sieberer For a short time he was Russian. :)

Danke! Gut dass es dir gefallen hat!

@@bastiaanwillems2252 das ist echt gut, habe ja selber ein RU-vid Projekt, WW2 mit Tabletop zum 80.Jahrestag, ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-CfiiI5riETI.html deshalb dauert es noch bis ich in Königsberg bin aber ich werde die Informationen mit Sicherheit gut gebrauchen können. Hoffe es kommt noch mehr.

Thanks!

Covid didn’t kill your business. Your government did!

Have fun!

Thanks man! If you have any questions after you read it, just tag me here, and I'll answer them!

Bernhard and I talked for over 6 hours, and could certainly have gone on much longer. Fortunately for the RU-vid community, he did a great job editing!

Thanks, that means a lot!

@@bastiaanwillems2252 No, thank you sir.

It had some merit to it, but it boils down that the entire idea were outside the capabilitys of the Wehrmacht in 1944.

It is rather defeatist any way you look at it though, it'd just prolong the inevitable.

Paraphrasing Nicholas Moran: "if you're stuck on the defense its only a matter of time of when you'll lose not if"

I believe TIK did a video on the troops in Courland. Namely, they did make attempts to evacuate them, but simply didn’t have the capacity to do so in an orderly manner.

@Varis Zuzans. A fortress only makes sense if it can be adequately supplied and pocesses a mobile strike force that can harass encircling enemy formations at will. For that, fully equipped military formations were required. It would seem that H ordered the establishment of fortresses without being advised by the Wehrmacht leadership that the Divisions he had earmarked were only a shadow of their former self. In any case, what could be expected from a military leadership, where even the head of intelligence seems to have been a British spy.

Very welcome!

Yes, both Red Army commanders and troops were much less willing to die on foreign soil in the final year of the war than is often assumed. These men were, after all, thinking and reacting in the very same way as other soldiers. Years of Cold War have made us believe that these men just ran into machine gun fire for no good reason, but the reality is considerably more nuanced.

Thanks for sharing your feelings.

@@bastiaanwillems2252 Well, no.. the Soviet commanders honestly didn't give a f*** about their soldiers. Neither did Stalin, who spurred his marshals on to conquer Germany faster. Zhukov was threatened by Stalin of being replaced with Konev if he didn't step up the pace (the Seelow heights, etc).. between 13. January and 25. April 1945, the red army lost 584,788 casualties, and losing 3525 tanks. Considering where things were at this point in the war, those are horrific losses, where i am pretty sure that at least half of that number was a pure waste in the rush to claw ones way forward.

@@PlacidDragon Cope seethe and dilate larper

@@thepeoplessneeder8108slavaboo mad

Thanks!

Canaris was working against Hitler, as was most of the Abwehr, for pretty much the entire war.

@@robertbruce7772 possibly yes

The Skoda plant was of prime industrial interest to the military-industrial complex of the regime at that stage in the war so the 17th Army was there to guard it, more or less. As was the Renault plant in Paris in 1942 and that is why it was in the sights of RAF Bomber Command an easy target of opportunity from a much shorter distance. Intimidating Sweden from Courland was just part of the show so the Swedes would think that Germany was still in charge of the Baltic Sea in order to keep maritime supply routes open for iron ore shipments. The Swedes had a contingent of troops there so I'm sure they would have had more of an idea of what was really going on in reality not to mention international broadcasts on BBC Radio. But you could say the same for the Danish connection to the area represented by their commitment. The same tactic was used in the Black Sea at Crimea so chromium would still flow in from Bursa, Turkey but they turned that tap off in April 1944 and as a result, the Soviets bagged 65,000 Romanian and German troops in an evacuation that probably should have got underway no later than March 25 1944.

I bet the historians who do these sorts of interviews sell a lot more books than those who don't

@@Arbiter099 I'm really doing it because I'm passionate. You don't become an academic historian for the big bucks, I'm afraid ;)

Well, as the author, here's the link. BONUS: if you have any questions after you read it, you can just tag me, and I'll answer them. Sweet deal ;) www.cambridge.org/be/academic/subjects/history/military-history/violence-defeat-wehrmacht-german-soil-19441945?format=HB

For the attacking allies, both areas, were of secondary importance. Berlin was the center of gravitation. Any axis of advance, towards the German capital, were of primary importance.

He has a video on the ostwall which might be what you're looking for.

One of the other videos Bernhard and I recorded deals with it. If you haven't seen it, it might be the one that is still coming.

5th Pz was in this sector. The SS 5th Pz ended the war in the Czech area down south.

yeah, the regular 5th, we would mention if it was an SS division for each name, except one is talking/writing purely about SS formations.

The "regular" 5th Panzer-Division. Also a battle-hardened unit that has fought for years on the Eastern Front.

Begleiten means to escort.

Begleit units were escort units for assortment of different formations. StuG brigades and battallions had begleit infantry companies & battallions who were trained to operate with StuG's (assault guns) and so on. Pretty much every single German division had some sort of begleit units in them. (Escort infantry for armored vechiles, escort for headquarters, escort for supply, etc.)

Did they have the assault rifle and ride on top like the Russians or were they in separate vehicles armed with Regular weapons.

@@deanmarquis4325 if you mean StuG begleit infantry they usually travelled by trucks and on special occasions on armored half trucks. Their main purpose was to clear enemy infantry from assault gun's side and rear and also clear path from mines, obstacles etc. for the assault gun. They didn't ride on assault gun in the same way as Russian tankodesanitki infantry did, because assault gun StuG was not meant to be used on offensive like tank, but rather as a mobile gun. This being said StuG's were also used as mount for begleit infantry occasionally. From latter part of 1944 begleit infantry had assault rifles with other weaponry

thank you!

@@MilitaryHistoryNotVisualized Its my pleasure

Thanks man!

Is it possible to disclose the question in more detail? The meaning of your message is unclear. What kind of children's regiment of the Red Army are we talking about?

What, in your opinion, is the drama of the Great Patriotic War on the part of the USSR?

It was very popular. The penal battalions loved it.

@@redundant2011 I mostly meant their commanders but sure.

I'm no expert, but I may be able to respond to some of the points you raise. You maintain that throwing rookies into "the fire" makes strategic sense because the rookies are less valuable than your best men. While this might be true, there's a second aspect to this that video games often assume that might not be true at all. Namely the idea that a soldier takes the same amount of "heat" to render combat ineffective regardless of the quality of their equipment and/or training. You often see this in RTS games like Company of Heroes, where most infantry models have similar amounts of hp and suppression resistance. Most video games choose to abstract or abstain from representing thing like morale, unit cohesion, mechanical quality, and a number of other factors that IRL could make a world of a difference in the combat effectiveness of a unit. Most militias are by definition going to be qualitatively and possibly quantitatively worse than standard military units in at least some of these qualities. For example, if your militia is using military surplus weapons with poor maintenance they might be at a massive disadvantage against an enemy using the same weapons but with adequate maintenance. This is a problem because getting your soldiers killed isn't actually an objective that's common IRL. Usually you demand sacrifices from your men in order to accomplish an objective. Sometimes that might be a tactical level objective, like when you need a fire team to pin an enemy down so another fire team can flank it. Sometimes you may demand huge sacrifices to achieve operational and/or strategic level objectives. Hitler's fortress plan was supposed to be a way to slow down the Soviet counter-offensives, and it would have by definition required huge sacrifices from the fortress units. In either case, you usually need your soldiers to do more than just eat bullets in order for the sacrifice to be meaningful. If the objective is to take a position aggressively, a local or militia unit with poor morale, poor unit cohesion, poor firepower, and less training is almost invariably going to perform worse at the task demanded than a regular military unit. If the objective is to hold a position, those very same factors will compromise a militia and/or local unit's ability to resist attack. In either case the militia/local unit is literally worse at fighting than a "regular" unit, although still an improvement over having no soldiers at all. If your militia/local units are somehow better than your regular units (a la Valkyria Chronicles) than they are literally your best men and your strategic logic doesn't really apply anymore.

@@LasertechStudios3142 valkyria chronicles is a videogame for weebs. Im talking about your most effective men using the less effective men as a distraction in order to accomplish a more important strategic goal. for instance entrenching your rookies in a position known to the enemy while your actual combat capable units maneuver. Im not talking about grand strategic levels here Im talking boots on the ground men knowingly sacrificing some for others. Id do it. If I had been fighting and new reinforcements come in theyre going to the front of the line to get shot.

@@bigboi7817 You write as if any peasant with a gun can hold a position under fire. Even holding an entrenched position is a demanding affair. At the minimum your holding force needs to have enough firepower and competence to prevent your opponent from either sweeping them aside or ignoring them. If your holding force is materially insufficient for the task, them they are going either going to get slaughtered or rendered irrelevant. If their training/morale is not up to stuff, then even a small amount of attention from the enemy could break their composure. If neither is an issue, then these militia/local units of yours are equal in worth to a regular unit.

Because the book is published in Britain, and I work in Britain. But I agree, I would have preferred kilometers, like the German and Soviet troops themselves.

@@bastiaanwillems2252 Its your book the british be damned. When you are right and they are wrong force them to change dont change yourself.

@@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714 The maps in my book have both km and miles ;)

​@@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714 Great sales technique you have there....or maybe not?

well, you can not have been in or close to Königsberg cause the North sea is far, far away considering that Königsberg is on the shore of the baltic sea. There had been not much of the Volkssturm cause the old were needed to steer the tracks with families heading west. You are talking from your nowadays experience forgetting that life back then was a totally different story. Back then the average life expectation would be 66 and those 50 or 60 year old were not as fit as nowadays 50 or 60 year old guys. So, if they would have found any wW1 veterans that had to be born before 1900 then those would have been 44 year old or older and many of those were already used for occupation administration and so on. These guys were not that battle heardend as you told. They had the fear of the barrages in their knees, old forgotten memories and they had not learned any most recent battle techniques. If you check the stats you will see that the Volkssturm had been mainly build up in the west - not in the east cause in the east the population density had been a fraction of that in the west.

@@typxxilps My bad on saying North Sea and not Baltic. But that point still stands on the sea being behind them. Didn't the famous painter Otto Dix serve in Konigsberg, and he was no young pup.

The thing is that most every able-bodied veteran of the Great War was already called up by 1942, as they were the men the Wehrmacht counted on to make up for the fact that they didn't have a lot of younger reservists thanks to the restrictions caused by the Treaty of Versailles. By 1945, the old men being herded into Volksturm were either the physically-unfit veterans of the Great War, or more likely, the farmers, factory workers, and other civilians who never served in the Imperial German Military because they were needed in the civilian economy during the Great War.

While both of you make good points my point is: given a specific set of circumstances, such as a small front. Troops don't need the highest degree of training to be effective.

@@typxxilps 50-60 years old would be in better shape as had to walk everywhere, lots of WW1 vets around, most generals were vets

Königsberg had no importance? Can you further elaborate. because personally I can see many reasons why you would want to capture it.

While the war was clearly lost by this point, the Soviets still had an interest in moving east faster. Remember, in January, this is the battle of the bulge. The Western allies are stalled. This is the Soviet chance to take more of Germany before the western allies get there. Then they have this big army group in East Prussia that's now stalled. They would have preferred to have Konigsberg down so they could use those forces in Poland and move a little faster. The Soviets would have preferred take it quickly, it wasn't existential. The Soviets didn't need it gone to March on Berlin, but they ended up wasting an army for two months taking a part of Germany they were always going to get when they could have used that army somewhere where future ownership was more in question.

@@drox3992 in september 1944 Red Army liberated Yugoslavia. In january 1945 they started grinding Budapest. Budapest- Wien 242km. Why would i waste soldiers attacking Konigsberg, a besiged city that have no chance of getting any reinforcement?

@@porksterbob january 1945 soviets started the siege of Budapest. Budapest-Wien 242 kilometers. Why would the soviet want to take the Konigsberg quickly when they can shell it for months and etnihcally cleans it for good?

@@505sa_7 But they wasted soldiers and it was not a slow grinding, they invested more than 1.5 million men in total, and in the end, they had more than 600 000 total casualties overall. They lost more men there than in Hungary.

Pale as Prussian snow

@@Lykyk and what war was that, Mr. Goebbels fan? "You'll probably need to improve your English". You know what Russians talk to this? "Не знаешь, что ответить? До...ись до орфографии".

Probably still in lockdown

@@demonprinces17 I see, they didn't allow even for having a walk there in lockdown.

Guessing a little from a little from column a and a little from column b. The treatment of civilians in eastern Europe and Germany by the Russians was in some ways an order of magnitude beyond the crimes committed by the Germans in '41 & 42. It was more wide spread, coordinated and in many ways endorsed by higher commanders compaired to the worst of the crimes committed by the Germans which tended to be concentrated under specific and we'll documented units. Not to be forgotten is the treatment of Soviet citizens who had done nothing beyond having the misfortune to live in areas occupied by the Germans who were treated appallingly by their so called liberators of the red army. Many of the woman suffering the same treatment that the red army would inflicted upon all women they encounter all the way to Berlin. I have read sources that estimate that between 50-60% of Estonian women between 14 and 49 suffered some form of forced contact with red army soldiers.

@@CS-zn6pp may they rot in hell with Mr Mustache and his thugs, the best way the world could’ve made it out of the war is with the Soviets collapsed, and an exhausted Germany getting ground down by the western allies, the death of the worst ideologies in history, and then we’d have world peace (for the most part) similar to the Pax Britannica except better

@@witssen9954 the fresh red army soldiers from east of the front line were fed made up lies of wholesale crimes and that only traitor to the motherland were left alive living in occupied territories. Political brainwashing of barely literate recruits.

@@CS-zn6pp The German swere deep into mass murder by 1941. The Wehrmacht had agreed to offer material support to the murder squads before a single German soldier set foot in the USSR. That war crimes were comitted by Soviets was true but it in no way diminishes what the Germans did in the USSR. I would point out the atrocities of the Wehrmacht ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-EEraxud7vZ4.html

@@caryblack5985 This. If the reds' actions and intentions had been half as bad as the Nazis, there wouldn't have been any German speakers left alive after 1945.

It’s not dead, it’s still there, a place of ancient glory, waiting to be retaken And when mr dictator lite fucks around and finds out with Europe it will be taken back from its occupiers, it’s tyrants

@@looinrims Be retaken. =.= Yeah sure crusader guy. :v

@@Lebdjev yeah you gnome, what do you call taking something that was taken originally from its owner? Yes, the act of retaking it Welcome to English for 3rd graders please turn your zoom camera on or whatever the fuck

@@looinrims interesting definitions, ownership... how does this ownership work following your rules? Doesnt everybody have a different owner or overlords at some point in history?

@@looinrims Can you stay polite ? Or you can talk to other only by insulting them ? :/

Test your opinion, by writing a comment about swedish king Gustav Adolf, who died in the 1630s.

@@brittakriep2938 obviously yours wasn’t taken out. I purposely didn’t even write Hitler, just Adolf. Unless they were deleted by Stephan. If that is the case, he can go F ** himself. That is just friggin censorship.

@@yuppy1967 not blaming you tube

It's RU-vid. This happens on all channels. And there's no logic behind their censorship.

> WTF? Both my comments were deleted because I had “Adolf” written in them? Or what was the reason Stefan? considering that my name is not "Stefan" nor is it "Stephan": > I purposely didn’t even write Hitler, just Adolf. Unless they were deleted by Stephan. nor had I ever a guest named "Stefan" or "Stephan", maybe you are just a troll?

You have to understand that war is a POLITICAL action, not a military one. Every battle has political ramifications.

The True Believers still saw victory. Anybody that that expressed a different opinion had to keep quiet and just do what they were told.

Ok, u go and tell Hitler that 🤣🤣

All true, just not the topic of my research.

Gustlov was a valid military target

The Germans also sank the Soviet hospital ship Armenia with a civilian population (up to 10K people died) at the end of 1941, claiming that it was a military transport ship. And this was probably true, since he flew under the flag of the navy and had his own artillery and military escort. And yes, this is an absolutely similar case of the death of Wilhelm Gustlof, who also transported the military.

@@jangrosek4334 Yes, a very similar case, and thank you for including it in this conversation - it is worth-while to draw these kind of comparisons, historiographically there's much to gain, since western historiography has not yet spent much attention to it.

Yeah, The whole rape of Eastern Europe “Regardless of these distinctions the Volksturm’s record against the Soviets is glaringly better”, certainly not indoctrination once the soviets reach into germany, just look at post war east germany occupied zone, or eastern austria, where 90% of all crime was by the soviets

At that time ( hell, even today ) you can really only know what your government allows you to know. That makes it entirely true, for you.

I guess you didn't know that the Russian army 1945 included many women and children.

@@princeofcupspoc9073 not in the infantry

@@lamwen03 Calling it propaganda when the negative consequences for your city when the russians rolled through (no matter whether they "liberated" you or conquered you) were both true and real seems manipulative though. Things were bad and that was obvious.

It has been a while since I looked at the Volkssturm, but they did they even have an Erkennungsmarke? I mean, in some cases they didn't even have a uniform or if they had a uniform it was not "uniform" with others often some captured ones.

In Königsberg there was not a complete process like that you'd see with joining the regular armed forces. What you might have found near Königsberg are, for example, Landesschutz Erkennungsmarke.

​@@MilitaryHistoryNotVisualized there are examples of such badges of ostpreussen Volkssturm in net with inscription VST 25/batallion number. I guess there were some finds by somebody but anyway those are very rare i presume. I think as fully militaristic organisation (if those are right words to use) Volkssturm had to have erkennungsmarke. If even paramilitary organizations like RAD, TODT and TeNo issued erkennungsmarke to their members. And furthermore - in besieged Koenigsberg even civilians were issued with badges similar to standart ekennungsmarke with information of their names, birth date and home address like those ones (and there are quite many finds) forum.ww2.ru/uploads/monthly_04_2021/post-51778-0-46187700-1617831259.jpg Bet even if Volkssturm member got little to no gear and antique rifle he still got soldbuch with proper inscriptions in it. But maybe i am wrong and different waves of mobilised Volkssturm could differ and ones sent to front in hurry could have nothing but rifles.

​@@bastiaanwillems2252 nah i doubt that Volkssturm and army units (and Landesschützen-Bataillone were very distinctive army units with its own purpose, role and recruitment criteria) could somehow mix up because Volkssturm wasn't part of Wehrmacht but was under control of NSDAP. Commandant of Koenigsberg general der infanterie Otto Lasch in his book "So fiel Königsberg" wrote about his conflicts with gauleiter (administative leader of gau Ostpreussen) Erich Koch about use of Volkssturm and noted that Koch saw those men as his personal force and mean to strengthen his postion. This shows that NSDAP officials responcible for Volkssturm would never delegate any function of forming these units to Wehrmacht.

@@mengir1464 Dear Mengir, I can only say that your research is based on some very old and incredibly biased sources. Lasch's memoir is a case in point: this man had every reason to lie, had his memoirs largely ghost-written, and actually has to admit that his work with Kreisleiter Wagner was productive. GL Koch was not in the city during the siege and had no authority there, despite what the army would go on to claim after the war (convenient excuse, as it means that army can evade responsibility). If you find this interesting, I can only suggest that you read my book, and if you still have questions after you read it, you can just tag me here. The "there was no Volkssturm there" line truly baffles me, to be frank. There's literally not one primary or secondary source that indicates that, film footage is readily present by both the Germans and the Soviets, so I don't quite get why you think that's not the case.