By the spring of 1944 the Red Army had driven the Germans out of most of Ukraine and back to the borders of Romania and Poland. In the north it had broken the siege of Leningrad. But in the center of the front, east of Minsk, the German Army Group Centre still held a great bulge of Belorussian forest, marsh and farmland, three years after it had swept through the same country in Operation Barbarossa. The Germans called it the balcony. In the summer of 1944 it became the scene of the worst defeat in the history of the German army.

The balcony

Army Group Centre had been the strongest of the three German army groups that invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. It took Minsk in the first week of the war and Smolensk in the second, and it came within sight of Moscow before the winter counteroffensive of December 1941 threw it back (see our Operation Barbarossa and Battle of Moscow collections). Through 1942 and 1943, while the great battles were fought at Stalingrad and Kursk, it held a long front east of Vitebsk, Orsha, Mogilev and Bobruisk, giving ground slowly.

By June 1944 its four armies, the Third Panzer, Fourth, Ninth and Second, held a salient that jutted far to the east of the armies on either side. Its commander was Field Marshal Ernst Busch, an officer valued by Hitler for his obedience more than for his experience of defensive war. On paper the army group was large: about 849,000 men, 486,000 of them combat troops. But it had only about 495 tanks and assault guns fit for action and a few hundred serviceable aircraft to cover a front of several hundred miles.

Looking the wrong way

The German high command was sure that the Soviet summer offensive would come in the south. The Red Army’s great tank armies were there, in Ukraine, after the spring battles; the open steppe favored armor; and a blow from Ukraine toward the Balkans or the Baltic coast could cut off whole army groups. German intelligence read the evidence the way it expected to read it, and the Soviets did everything they could to help it along (see Chapter 2).

In May 1944 the German army moved its reserves accordingly. The LVI Panzer Corps was transferred from Army Group Centre to Army Group North Ukraine, and with it went, by one German historian’s count, about 15 percent of Busch’s divisions, 88 percent of his tanks and a third of his heavy artillery. The balcony was left held by infantry divisions spread thin along the line, many of them under strength.

Hitler’s fortified places

On 8 March 1944 Hitler issued an order creating “fortified places” on the Eastern Front. Towns on the main roads and railways were to be held by a garrison of one or more divisions to the last man, even if surrounded, to tie down the Soviet advance. In Belorussia the list included Vitebsk, Orsha, Mogilev, Bobruisk, Minsk, Baranovichi, Slutsk and Vilnius. The order meant that when the Soviet attack came, German divisions would be left behind in towns the Red Army simply went around.

Gallery · 6 photographs · select to enlarge

Army Group Centre in the weeks before the storm

Three years of occupation

For the people of Belorussia the three years of occupation had been among the worst endured anywhere in Europe. The Germans murdered almost the entire Jewish population, in mass shootings, in the ghettos of Minsk and other towns and at the killing site of Maly Trostenets outside the capital. Hundreds of thousands of people were deported to Germany for forced labor. In their war against the partisans, German security units and their auxiliaries burned villages with their inhabitants; at Khatyn, on 22 March 1943, about 149 people, many of them children, were locked in a barn and burned alive. The memorial there records 185 Belorussian villages destroyed and never rebuilt (see Chapter 9).

The partisans, in turn, grew into a large movement controlled from Moscow. By 1944 there were roughly 140,000 of them in the forests and marshes behind Army Group Centre, and whole districts were beyond German control.

Gallery · 4 photographs · select to enlarge

Occupation and resistance

Stalin’s choice

At the Teheran Conference at the end of 1943, Stalin had promised Roosevelt and Churchill a great offensive in the summer of 1944 to coincide with the Allied landing in France (see Chapter 8). In the spring the Soviet General Staff weighed where to strike. The south offered open country; Belorussia offered forests, rivers and the vast Pripet Marshes. But Belorussia was Soviet territory still under occupation, the road through it led most directly to Warsaw and Germany, and Army Group Centre, stripped of its armor, was the weakest of the German army groups.

The choice was made for Belorussia. The operation was given the name of Prince Pyotr Bagration, the Georgian-born Russian general mortally wounded fighting Napoleon at Borodino in 1812, a name reportedly chosen by Stalin himself.

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