Steiner's Actual Final Counterattack

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]In the winter of 1945, SS Obergruppenführer Felix Steiner gathered the men of his Nordland division and spoke to them.

[00:00:06]Eric Wallin, a Swedish volunteer who had fought under Steiner from the Baltic to Pomerania, recorded what he said.

[00:00:13]Steiner stood before soldiers who had followed him across four years and several countries. Men who had held the Tannenberg line when the Red Army came in waves, who had survived Narva when the entire core was reduced to 200 effective fighting men who had been evacuated from the Courland pocket by sea and transferred without rest into a collapsing front in Pomerania.

[00:00:34]Many of them had been fighting continuously since 1941. They were not boys. They were the men who had outlived every catastrophe the war had produced and were still standing, and they knew exactly what was coming. Steiner told them this. He said, "This is the battle of the Occident. The wall has fallen.

[00:00:51]This is the last battle. We must fight to the end. No promises. No wonder weapons. No suggestion that relief was coming or that the sacrifice being demanded of them would be rewarded with anything except the knowledge that it had been made.

[00:01:09]Steiner had been telling his men the truth since 1941, telling them what the ground was, what the enemy had, what each action would cost, and they had trusted him for it.

[00:01:18]By February 1945, that trust was the most valuable thing he possessed because it was all he had left to offer. He had 50,000 men. He had 300 tanks. He had fuel for three days of combat. And he had the men who had listened to him say the wall had fallen and who were going to attack the largest army in the world anyway. This is the story of what they did. Not the story most people know, the famous scene from the film where Hitler screams in the bunker because Steiner has not attacked. That scene is real and that story is real, but it comes later.

[00:01:49]Before it, in February 1945 in the frozen farmland of Pomerania, Steiner actually attacked. His men actually fought.

[00:01:58]>> [music] >> And what that attack achieved, not what it was intended to achieve, but what it accidentally accomplished, changed the timeline of the war's final chapter in a way that almost no account of the period properly describes.

[00:02:10]To understand why the men of Nordland would follow Felix Steiner into a battle he had told them could not be won, you need to understand who he was and what he had done to earn that specific quality of trust.

[00:02:21]Felix Martin Julius Steiner was born on May 23rd, 1896 in Ebenrode, East Prussia, the son of a grammar school teacher.

[00:02:29]He volunteered for the Prussian army at 17 in March 1914, joining the 5th East Prussian Infantry Regiment before the First World War had been going a month.

[00:02:38]He fought through all of it, four years on the Eastern and Western Fronts, rising to Oberleutnant, winning the Iron Cross first and second class, surviving the specific industrial slaughter that turned the men who went in as volunteers into something harder and quieter than the boys who had enlisted.

[00:02:55]He left the army after the war, joined the Freikorps in the chaos of the post-war period, rejoined the regular Reichswehr in 1921, and spent the interwar years as a staff officer and trainer, studying how armies are built, how soldiers are taught, what the difference is between men who break under pressure, and men who do not. In the mid-1930s, he transferred from the conventional army to the SS Verfügungstruppe, the armed SS formations that would become the Waffen-SS.

[00:03:22]The reasons are not entirely clear from the record. He was not, by the accounts of those who served with him, a man of particular ideological conviction. What the SSVT offered was the chance to build something from the ground up, to apply ideas about training and leadership that the rigid structure of the regular army would not accommodate.

[00:03:40]He took the SS Regiment Deutschland and shaped it according to principles he had developed over two decades. Physical standards higher than the conventional army required, training that developed individual initiative rather than mechanical obedience, an approach to leadership that required officers to be capable of everything they demanded of their men, and to be visibly capable of it.

[00:04:00]He turned the Deutschland Regiment into a formation that other soldiers watched with professional respect mixed with a specific contempt that veteran soldiers reserve for formations they cannot quite dismiss.

[00:04:11]In Poland in September 1939, Steiner's Regiment was attached to the armored Kempf Division and fought at Mława at the Rozan River Crossing and at the siege of Modlin Fortress, which surrendered on September 28th.

[00:04:25]The fighting at Modlin was direct assault against prepared fortifications, the kind of operation that costs men at every wall and every door, where the outcome depends on whether the men going through the openings keep moving or go to ground. Steiner's men kept moving. He won the clasps to both his Iron Crosses for Modlin.

[00:04:44]In France in May and June 1940, the regiment crossed the Wilhelmina Canal, captured the island of Walcheren, broke through the Weygand Line in the second phase of the campaign, and drove deep into France with the armored formations.

[00:04:56]>> [music] >> The Knight's Cross came on August 15th, 1940 for the regiment's performance across the campaign.

[00:05:02]Officers who watched the Deutschland fight in France recorded something specific about how it took objectives.

[00:05:08]It took them with fewer men and in less time than the estimates had suggested was possible. This was not luck. It was the product of how Steiner had trained the men who were doing it.

[00:05:17]In 1941, Heinrich Himmler selected Steiner to command the newly forming 5th SS Division Wiking, the flagship international formation of the Waffen-SS built primarily from volunteers across occupied and allied Western Europe.

[00:05:30]Danes, Norwegians, Dutch, Flemish, Swedes, Finns, Estonians.

[00:05:35]Men who had enlisted for reasons spread across the full range of human motivation, from genuine ideological conviction to simple adventurism to the particular restlessness of young men in occupied countries who wanted to do something more than watch from behind windows.

[00:05:50]Steiner understood these men better than most of his SS colleagues had any capacity to.

[00:05:55]He did not waste time on racial hierarchy when military effectiveness was what the situation required. He wanted soldiers and he made soldiers and the Wiking division that entered the Soviet Union in June 1941 was a formation whose men did not yet know each other well enough to trust each other the way they eventually would, but who were being shaped by someone who understood exactly how that trust was built.

[00:06:17]The Wiking drove through Ukraine as part of Army Group South fighting at Rostov along the Don through the grinding attritional fighting of the Kuban bridgehead.

[00:06:26]Steiner received the Oak Leaves to his Knight's Cross on December 23rd, 1942 for his leadership of the division through the Don campaign.

[00:06:35]The decoration was not for a specific dramatic action, but for the less visible and more important quality of keeping a formation functional through months of continuous fighting that was destroying the offensive capability of German divisions all around it.

[00:06:48]The Wiking under Steiner came out of its first full year on the Eastern Front still capable of executing complex operations.

[00:06:54]>> [music] >> In an army that was starting to collapse into improvisation and desperation, this was worth more than any number of individual acts of conspicuous bravery.

[00:07:05]In July 1943, Steiner was elevated to command of the 3rd SS Panzer Corps designated the 3rd Germanic SS Panzer Corps to reflect its composition of primarily Scandinavian and Western European volunteer formations.

[00:07:19]Nordland was the core of it built from Norwegian and Danish volunteers.

[00:07:23]The Dutch SS formation, the Flemish Brigades, various other Western European units.

[00:07:29]By 1943, these men had been fighting for two or three years and they constituted something specific in the German order of battle. Foreign soldiers whose countries were not formally at war with the Soviet Union who had made individual choices to be there and who had survived long enough to understand exactly what those choices had cost them.

[00:07:47]In January 1944, Steiner's Corps was on the Leningrad Front facing the Soviet 2nd Shock Army.

[00:07:53]The Soviet winter offensive of 1944 struck the German positions around Leningrad with the specific purpose of finally breaking the siege that had been running since 1941.

[00:08:03]The weight of the attack fell on the German 18th Army, and the 18th Army gave way. What followed was one of the most prolonged and costly defensive battles of the entire Eastern Front, the retreat to Narva, the holding of the Narva bridgehead, and then the Battle of the Tannenberg Line in Estonia >> [music] >> through the summer of 1944. The Narva bridgehead was a strip of ground on the western bank of the Narva River, perhaps 3 km deep, held against Soviet forces that outnumbered the defenders by ratios that made conventional military calculation irrelevant.

[00:08:34]Soviet artillery pounded the position continuously.

[00:08:37]Attacks came in waves that had no particular pattern because the pattern was simply keep attacking until something breaks. Steiner's Corps held it. The cost was men at a rate that ground the formation down from a Corps to something that bore only the name of a Corps.

[00:08:53]By the worst point of the fighting, the effective strength of the 3rd Germanic SS Panzer Corps was approximately 200 soldiers, not 200 per battalion, 200 men in total across a Corps that had started with thousands defending a strip of ground against an army.

[00:09:08]Wallin describes the Narva fighting in his memoir with the specific emotional restraint of a man reporting what he witnessed rather than dramatizing it.

[00:09:16]The dead were everywhere. The positions were held by whoever was still alive in them.

[00:09:21]The men who ran out of ammunition took ammunition from the men next to them who no longer needed it.

[00:09:26]The ground itself became a landmark of the dead.

[00:09:29]This position marked by the body of a Norwegian, that one by a Dane, who had been there since the beginning.

[00:09:35]Steiner was present.

[00:09:37]This is what Wallin records most consistently about him across the Narva battle.

[00:09:42]The general was at the positions, not behind them.

[00:09:45]He appeared at the points of worst pressure. He made decisions in real time with the specific information that only comes from being physically present at the place where the decision matters.

[00:09:55]His men did not love him in the way that men love comfortable commanders who keep them away from danger.

[00:10:00]They trusted him the way men trust someone who has demonstrated repeatedly that he understands the danger and will not waste them on it unnecessarily.

[00:10:09]Steiner received the swords to his Knight's Cross on August 10th, 1944, specifically for Narva.

[00:10:15]The Corps then fought the Tannenberg Line through the summer.

[00:10:19]A defensive position in Estonia that the Nordland soldiers held for months against Soviet attacks that came in waves from a front that had complete material superiority at every point.

[00:10:29]The Tannenberg Line held long enough for a significant German evacuation from Estonia before Soviet forces swept through in September.

[00:10:37]Then the Third Germanic SS Panzer Corps was gradually compressed into the Courland Pocket.

[00:10:42]The German enclave on the Baltic coast that was cut off from the rest of the front in October, 1944, when Soviet forces reached the sea west of Riga.

[00:10:51]100,000 German soldiers in a pocket supplied by sea, doing nothing strategically useful while the front west of them collapsed.

[00:10:59]Guderian argued for months that the Courland forces should be evacuated and used to defend Germany itself. Hitler refused every time.

[00:11:07]In January 1945, the evacuation that Hitler had refused to authorize was finally partially executed under the pressure of complete emergency.

[00:11:15]Steiner and the core of his Corps were loaded onto ships at Libau and transported to Germany. They arrived in Pomerania at the end of January exhausted from the Courland fighting in a country that was already losing.

[00:11:26]On January 28th, 1945, Steiner was placed in command of the 11th SS Panzer Army.

[00:11:32]This title required careful reading. I An army in German military organization was a formation of multiple core, tens of thousands of soldiers, a substantial staff with a capacity to plan and execute complex operations.

[00:11:45]The 11th SS Panzer Army was none of these things. It was a collection of depleted divisions assembled in Pomerania, many arriving without full weapons or vehicles or ammunition, commanded by a man who had just spent months in a pocket, and who was being asked to attack the most powerful army in the world with what was available.

[00:12:02]The 11th SS Panzer Army was assigned to Army Group Vistula.

[00:12:06]The commander of Army Group Vistula was Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the final solution, the administrator of the SS police empire, a [music] man whose sole military experience consisted of serving in a reserve battalion in the First World War without seeing combat, followed by two decades of building a political and administrative organization.

[00:12:26]Hitler had appointed him because the one quality Himmler reliably possessed was obedience. He would carry out orders without the arguments professional military officers kept raising, and he would apply sufficient terror to his own troops that no soldier would retreat without permission.

[00:12:40]That this commander was also completely incapable of understanding the military situation he was being asked to manage was a secondary concern to Hitler in January 1945.

[00:12:50]Guderian, the army chief of staff, had been fighting a separate war inside the German command structure for months, arguing against futile offensives, demanding evacuations, trying to concentrate reserves for the defense of the Oder Line. He had lost almost every argument. The 6th SS Panzer Army had gone to Hungary instead of the Oder.

[00:13:08]>> [music] >> The Courland Pocket had not been evacuated. East Prussia had not been shortened. Now, with the crisis fully arrived, he was trying to extract something coherent from the chaos of Army Group Vistula.

[00:13:20]His original plan had genuine operational logic, a major counterattack from Pomerania into Zhukov's exposed northern flank, coordinated with a thrust from south of Berlin, encircling the Soviet spearheads east of the Oder.

[00:13:33]Zhukov's 1st Belorussian Front had advanced 300 miles in 3 weeks, and its flank was thin.

[00:13:39]The Soviet rifle divisions at the tip of the advance averaged around 4,000 men, less than half their nominal strength.

[00:13:46]The 1st Belorussian Front had suffered 77,342 casualties between January 12th and February 3rd alone. It was powerful, but not invulnerable. For the plan to work, Guderian needed the formations trapped in pointless holdouts, the Courland Army, the East Prussia divisions, the 6th SS Panzer Army.

[00:14:06]None of these were available.

[00:14:08]Hitler refused everything.

[00:14:10]What Guderian was left with was the formations in Pomerania and whatever could be scraped from rear areas, 50,000 men, approximately 300 tanks, fuel, and ammunition for 3 days of combat.

[00:14:22]Over 1,200 tanks had been allocated to the operation on paper.

[00:14:27]There were no trains available to transport them.

[00:14:29]Steiner telephoned Guderian directly, bypassing Himmler because Himmler was useless.

[00:14:34]He told Guderian that the attack as planned, drive 70 km south, cut off Zhukov's spearheads, relieve the city of Küstrin, was a suicide mission with the available forces and would accomplish nothing except the destruction of the last coherent German formation in Pomerania.

[00:14:49]He proposed a more limited operation, a shorter range attack that would achieve a specific tactical objective, and maintain the 11th SS Panzer Army's capacity to continue defending Pomerania.

[00:15:01]The telephone call ended with Steiner shouting at the army chief of staff, "Accept my plan or relieve me."

[00:15:07]Guderian's reply, "Have it your own way."

[00:15:10]Guderian also fought the separate battle of getting a competent officer into actual operational command. He confronted Hitler directly, demanding that General Walther Wenck, 44 years old, the youngest general in the German army, a man of genuine professional competence, be given authority to direct the attack rather than Himmler.

[00:15:28]Hitler almost screamed during this argument, according to Guderian's memoir.

[00:15:33]He insisted that Himmler was capable of carrying the attack on his own. Guderian held his position.

[00:15:39]Eventually, Hitler gave in.

[00:15:41]Wenck was sent to Army Group Vistula headquarters with a special mandate.

[00:15:45]The mandate did not specify what his actual authority was, which meant in practice that the command arrangement was ambiguous and Himmler could still interfere. But Wenck was there, which was better than Himmler alone.

[00:15:56]Not all units had reached their starting positions when the planned launch date arrived.

[00:16:00]The 39th Panzer Corps on the right was still moving through the limited bridge crossings at Stettin.

[00:16:06]The improvised Corps Group Munzel on the left was not fully assembled, but the 11th SS Panzergrenadier Division Nordland, the Danes, Norwegians, Flemings, and Swedes, who had been with Steiner's Corps since the Baltic campaigns, was in position and ready.

[00:16:20]The decision was made not to wait. If the entire army waited for full assembly, Soviet reconnaissance would identify the build-up and the element of surprise would be lost.

[00:16:30]Nordland would attack on February 15th.

[00:16:32]The division moved south before dawn through frozen Pomeranian farmland.

[00:16:37]The terrain was flat to gently rolling, dotted with woodlands and cut by streams and lakes, with the kind of open ground that suited armored movement when the ground was frozen, but that would become treacherous mud once the spring thaw arrived.

[00:16:50]The thaw was already beginning.

[00:16:52]The roads were the only reliable surface for the Tiger II heavy tanks of the 503rd SS Heavy Tank Battalion attached to support the attack. Those tanks weighed 68 tons.

[00:17:03]Off the roads, in the softening fields, they would slow and eventually stop.

[00:17:08]The tank commanders knew this and they stayed on the roads, and Soviet anti-tank teams who understood the same geography had pre-registered the roads as targets.

[00:17:17]The 503rd SS Heavy Tank Battalion had been formed from what had originally been an infantry company of the Nordland division itself.

[00:17:25]A detail that gives the collaboration between the tanks and the infantry on February 15th a specific character.

[00:17:31]These were men who had served together before the battalion was expanded and re-equipped. The Tiger II crews and the Nordland panzer grenadiers advancing beside them were not strangers.

[00:17:41]>> [music] >> They knew each other's methods.

[00:17:43]When a Tiger II stopped at an intersection to engage a Soviet anti-tank position, the grenadiers who swept the flanks while the tank was firing understood what the tank was doing and what it needed from them.

[00:17:54]This is the kind of tactical coordination that cannot be manufactured in a training exercise.

[00:17:58]It exists between soldiers who have spent enough time in the field together to have developed a shared operational language below the level of formal orders. The Soviet 61st Army under General Pavel Belov was holding the sector that Nordland attacked. The 61st had not expected an attack at this point. At this time, Zhukov had been warned by intelligence a build-up was occurring in Pomerania, but he did not know the exact timing or precise location.

[00:18:23]The Soviet forward positions in the path of Nordland's advance were not prepared for the specific weight of what was coming.

[00:18:29]A division with Tiger II support, experienced soldiers who had been attacking and defending since 1941, moving through the darkness before the defenders fully understood what was happening.

[00:18:40]A Soviet officer's account of the opening hours of February 15th describes the initial confusion in the forward positions of the 61st Army.

[00:18:48]German armor had appeared on a road that Soviet assessment had judged unlikely for an armored axis because of the terrain.

[00:18:55]The Tiger IIs were engaging from distances that the anti-tank guns in position could not cover.

[00:19:00]Infantry who moved to engage the flanks of the German column ran into Nordland's panzer grenadiers advancing in close coordination with the tanks.

[00:19:09]The account notes that the situation became unclear very quickly. Units lost contact with their neighbors. Radio communications were disrupted by the speed of the German advance. And the orders coming down from Army headquarters were based on intelligence that was already several hours out of date.

[00:19:24]By the time the 61st Army had a picture of what was actually happening, Nordland's vanguard was already through the forward defensive belt and moving toward Arnswalde.

[00:19:33]Nordland's vanguard broke through the first Soviet positions in the early morning of February 15th.

[00:19:38]The Tiger IIs of the 503rd engaged Soviet anti-tank guns and armored vehicles at ranges where the Soviet weapons could not effectively reply.

[00:19:47]A Tiger II engaging at 1,500 m in flat terrain was presenting a problem to Soviet tank crews whose guns were designed to fight at combat ranges significantly shorter than that.

[00:19:58]The German crews were experienced men who understood how to use the qualitative advantage their vehicles provided. Staying at distance, keeping frontal armor toward the threat, engaging methodically before closing.

[00:20:09]Soviet positions that had been built to stop a conventional infantry assault were not built to stop 68-ton tanks firing from ranges the defenders could not match.

[00:20:19]The division drove 7 mi south through the Soviet positions and reached Arnswalde in the afternoon of February 15th. Arnswalde was a German town that had been encircled during the Soviet advance in January. A garrison of several hundred soldiers and a civilian population trapped behind Soviet lines when the front swept past them.

[00:20:37]The vanguard of Nordland reached the perimeter.

[00:20:40]The siege was broken. The civilians were reached. The corridor into the town was open. On the first day of the operation, the attack had achieved its immediate objective. This detail gets passed over quickly in most accounts of Operation Solstice because the overall operation failed, and historical writing tends to compress failures into their outcome.

[00:20:59]But in the freezing flat farmland of Pomerania on February 15th, 1945, the men Steiner had spoken to about the last battle of the occident had gone into the attack and on the first day they had won.

[00:21:12]The Danes and Norwegians and Flemings who had been fighting under Steiner since the Baltic campaigns had driven 7 miles through Zhukov's flank and broken a siege. They had done exactly what Steiner had designed the limited operation to do.

[00:21:25]February 16th opened with the full offensive committed. The 39th Panzer Corps had crossed the Stettin bridges and took position on the right with the Holstein Panzer Division formed from training units barely a week before the attack began. Men who had been turned into a division by adding a title to an assortment of rear area personnel leading alongside the veteran 10th SS Panzer Division Frundsberg. The Holstein Division defeated two Soviet brigades and forced them south.

[00:21:52]The central corridor to Arnswalde was widened by Nordland and the Frundsberg pushing the Soviet front 8 to 12 km back from [music] the positions it had held the previous day.

[00:22:02]The Tiger IIs were working through the Soviet defensive positions methodically and Soviet accounts from this period describe the specific shock of encountering the German heavy tanks in this sector at this time. One Soviet after-action report noted that the Tiger II was engaging at ranges that the available anti-tank weapons could not cover requiring infantry to attempt close-range attacks with anti-tank grenades against vehicles whose crew visibility made such approaches extremely dangerous.

[00:22:28]The 503rd was losing tanks to mines and to the occasional IS-2 heavy tank whose 122 mm gun could penetrate the Tiger II's armor at the ranges the terrain forced.

[00:22:40]But the German heavy tanks were also destroying Soviet armor faster than the Soviet formations could replace the losses in the immediate sector.

[00:22:47]The flanks were the problem the operation could not solve.

[00:22:51]The 39th Panzer Corps on the right was stopped by Bogdanov's 2nd Guards Tank Army which had been positioned precisely to cover this flank.

[00:23:00]Zhukov had more than 270 tanks in the 2nd Guards Tank Army, and Bogdanov committed them to meeting the German right flank head-on.

[00:23:09]The 39th Corps pushed the Soviets out of several villages, recaptured ground along the eastern shore of a local lake, drove forward in places.

[00:23:18]It did not break through. It stalled 70 km short of Küstrin.

[00:23:23]The Corps Group Munzel on the left fared worst of all, >> [music] >> ran into solid prepared Soviet defensive positions, and was essentially paralyzed, leaving the left flank of the 3rd Germanic SS Panzer Corps exposed to the pressure that Bogdanov's reserves could apply from that direction.

[00:23:39]By the evening of February 16th, the German command structure was trying to decide where to concentrate its effort, which units to reinforce, which axes to abandon.

[00:23:48]Wenck was making this assessment while simultaneously driving to Hitler's headquarters in Berlin for the daily briefing that Hitler had insisted upon.

[00:23:56]A round trip of 320 km that Wenck was making every day because Hitler demanded daily attendance at his situation conferences regardless of whether the commander responsible for an ongoing offensive operation could afford 8 hours away from his headquarters.

[00:24:13]On the evening of February 17th, after his briefing in Berlin, Wenck drove back toward Pomerania.

[00:24:19]His driver had been on duty for two continuous days and was barely functional from exhaustion.

[00:24:24]Wenck took the wheel. On the road back to army headquarters, he fell asleep and the car went off the road and into a bridge abutment.

[00:24:32]His driver pulled him from the wreckage.

[00:24:34]Wenck had a fractured skull and five broken ribs. He was hospitalized and did not return to operational command for weeks.

[00:24:41]The only competent professional officer with authority over the operation was gone.

[00:24:46]Himmler remained. And Himmler, who had been calling his personal physician with increasing frequency as the offensive stalled and his inability to affect the situation became undeniable, declared himself ill on February 18th and was driven to the Hohenlychen Sanatorium north of Berlin.

[00:25:03]He checked into the facility and placed himself under medical care. He left no effective deputy in charge. He simply left.

[00:25:10]The most powerful man in the SS apparatus, the nominal commander of an army group, left his headquarters in the middle of an active operation because the operation was failing and he did not want to be there when the failure became complete. He did not return to active command. Hitler replaced him with General Gotthard Heinrici on March 20th, by which point Army Group Vistula had been effectively without a commanding officer for over a month.

[00:25:33]Army Group Vistula halted Operation Solstice on February 18th.

[00:25:37]The maximum German advance had been 30 km. Army Group Vistula had been relieved. Nothing else on the list of stated objectives had been achieved.

[00:25:45]Küstrin was still in Soviet hands.

[00:25:48]Zhukov's flank was still intact.

[00:25:50]The 11th SS Panzer Army had lost men and tanks and the 3 days of fuel and ammunition it had started with and was now holding positions in a Pomeranian landscape that Soviet pressure would make untenable within days.

[00:26:02]On February 19th, Zhukov counterattacked.

[00:26:05]The 61st Army and the 2nd Guards Tank Army drove into the German positions that had been stalled since February 17th. The German salient collapsed.

[00:26:14]Forward positions were abandoned. The contrast between the Soviet and German capacity to sustain operations by this stage was visible in the simplest logistical facts.

[00:26:22]Where the German attack had fuel for 3 days, the Soviet counterattack had supply lines that had been built, repaired, [music] and expanded over 6 weeks of planning.

[00:26:32]Where the German attack had committed its reserves before it began, the Soviet response drew on formations that had been held back precisely for this moment.

[00:26:41]A Soviet regimental diary from the 2nd Guards Tank Army records the counterattack on February 19th as professionally satisfying.

[00:26:48]The German positions were identified.

[00:26:50]The routes of advance were known, the supporting artillery had pre-registered its targets, and the German formations that had been pushing forward for 3 days were already exhausted.

[00:27:00]The diary notes that German resistance was determined, but that the German formations were moving at a tempo that indicated exhaustion rather than the confidence of men who believed they could hold.

[00:27:11]They were fighting because they had to fight, not because they thought they could win. Vehicles that could not be moved fast enough were left where they stood.

[00:27:20]February 21st, the German command withdrew the 39th Panzer Corps headquarters and four divisions westward, Holstein, Frondsberg, the Führer Grenadier, the Führer Begleit, effectively conceding Eastern Pomerania.

[00:27:34]February 24th, Rokossovsky's Second Belorussian Front opened the East Pomeranian Offensive on Zhukov's northern flank, driving 60 km forward in the first phase, cutting off the German forces along the Baltic coast from those retreating westward.

[00:27:49]Eastern Pomerania was lost. Steiner kept command of the 11th SS Panzer Army until early March, when he handed it to General Walter Lucht, and reverted to commanding the 3rd Germanic SS Panzer Corps.

[00:28:02]The 11th SS Panzer Army was finished as an offensive instrument. What remained of its formations was fed into the defensive line along the Oder that the Germans were desperately trying to construct against the next Soviet attack, the attack that, when it came, would end Berlin.

[00:28:18]Here is the thing that most accounts of Operation Solstice omit because they end with the failure.

[00:28:23]In Moscow, in the weeks after February 15th, a specific decision was being made about Berlin.

[00:28:28]Zhukov had expected to continue his drive on the German capital after the Vistula-Oder Offensive.

[00:28:35]The Soviet planning for the final assault on Berlin called for an attack in mid-February 1945.

[00:28:41]The momentum of the January Offensive was there.

[00:28:44]The German defenses on the Oder were incomplete. Berlin was 70 km from the Soviet forward positions. Stalin and the Stavka had been building toward this.

[00:28:53]The formations were positioned. The supply lines, strained but functional, could support a continued advance.

[00:29:00]Then 300 German tanks appeared from Pomerania and struck Zhukov's northern flank.

[00:29:05]The 61st Army had been surprised. A German force of uncertain size was operating on the right wing. Tiger II tanks were destroying Soviet armor in a sector that had been assessed as secure.

[00:29:16]>> [music] >> The situation had been contained. The 2nd Guards Tank Army had been committed and the German attack had been stopped.

[00:29:23]But the fact of the attack told Zhukov something important.

[00:29:26]The German capacity for offensive action had not been completely eliminated.

[00:29:30]There were more German formations in Pomerania than his intelligence had shown.

[00:29:35]If he drove to Berlin while those formations were still operational on his northern flank, he exposed his supply lines and his right wing to further action from that direction.

[00:29:45]Rokossovsky's front, which should have been covering him, was still fighting in East Prussia.

[00:29:50]Zhukov recommended to Stalin that the drive on Berlin be postponed until Pomerania was cleared.

[00:29:56]Stalin agreed. The planned February assault on Berlin was canceled.

[00:30:00]The East Pomeranian Offensive consumed the period February 24th to April 4th.

[00:30:05]Six full weeks of fighting to clear the German formations from a province that Soviet forces would have swept through incidentally if they had already taken Berlin.

[00:30:13]The Battle of Berlin opened on April 16th, 1945, not February, not March, April 16th.

[00:30:20]Those two months between the planned February assault and the actual April one were the direct consequence of 300 German tanks attacking with three days of fuel from Pomerania.

[00:30:30]Whether those two months changed the eventual outcome is an open question.

[00:30:34]>> [music] >> Berlin fell when it fell, and no two-month delay in the Soviet assault would have changed the final result.

[00:30:41]What those two months did was allow the Oder defensive line to be strengthened, allow additional German formations to be assembled in the path of the Soviet advance, and allow the fighting that killed tens of thousands of additional soldiers on both sides during the siege of Berlin itself.

[00:30:57]Steiner's attack failed in every stated objective and bought the city two months it used to bleed.

[00:31:02]Nordland retreated westward with the rest of the German forces in Pomerania through March 1945.

[00:31:08]The division fought defensive actions along the Oder, withdrawing as Soviet pressure made each position untenable.

[00:31:14]In April, it was transferred to the Berlin area.

[00:31:17]On April 16th, it received orders to reinforce defenses east of the city as Zhukov's final offensive opened.

[00:31:23]The men who had driven to Arnswalde in February were in the eastern suburbs of Berlin in April fighting the same army that had broken Operation Solstice in Pomerania with fewer men and less ammunition than they had started the year with and nowhere to retreat that was not also under Soviet fire.

[00:31:39]The division's story in Berlin has been told elsewhere on this channel.

[00:31:42]What it means in the context of Operation Solstice is this. The men Steiner spoke to about the last battle of the oxidant fought that battle twice.

[00:31:51]Once in February in Pomerania and once in April in the ruins of the German capital.

[00:31:55]Most of them did not come out of the second one. The handful who did, like Wallen who escaped in an Italian refugee disguise, carried with them the specific knowledge of what it had been like to be addressed by a general who told the truth about what was happening and then led the attack himself.

[00:32:11]On April 21st, 1945, Hitler sat in the Führerbunker and heard Steiner's name in the situation briefing.

[00:32:18]The corps Steiner commanded was positioned north of Berlin. Hitler seized on it. He designated the forces in that area Army Detachment Steiner and issued a direct order. Attack southeastward, cut off the Soviet advance, encircle Zhukov's leading elements, and relieve Berlin.

[00:32:33]Steiner looked at what he had. The 5th Jäger Division and the 25th Panzergrenadier Division both deployed defensively, both unable to be redeployed until replacement units arrived from the coast. Two battalions of the 4th SS Police Division with no heavy weapons.

[00:32:48]His effective striking force for an attack designed to cut off the 1st Belorussian Front was approximately two infantry battalions with no armor.

[00:32:56]He told his Army Group Commander Heinrici the attack could not be executed. Heinrici tried to call Hitler and was told Hitler was too busy to take the call.

[00:33:05]April 22nd, the afternoon conference.

[00:33:08]Hitler learned that Steiner was not attacking. The scene that the film Downfall reconstructed from the accounts of officers who were present is this.

[00:33:16]A man who had been performing certainty for years performed his last version of it >> [music] >> then stopped. He said the war was lost.

[00:33:23]He said he would stay in Berlin and die there.

[00:33:26]He dismissed the generals who argued with him. It was the second time Steiner had refused to sacrifice his men for a military objective that did not exist.

[00:33:35]The first time in February he had attacked anyway with what he had and bought two months.

[00:33:39]This time there was nothing to attack with and nothing to buy.

[00:33:43]The operation Hitler demanded would have consumed the last coherent German force north of Berlin in two days and changed nothing except the casualty list.

[00:33:52]Keitel was sent north of Berlin with orders for Steiner to attack immediately. Steiner refused. Heinrici was sent. Steiner refused.

[00:34:01]On April 27th he was relieved of his command.

[00:34:04]He asked the man who came to relieve him to continue to serve in some capacity.

[00:34:08]>> [music] >> The answer was yes. He continued to lead elements of his formation westward away from the Soviet advance and toward the Americans.

[00:34:16]On May 3rd, 1945 Felix Steiner surrendered to American forces. He had been fighting since September 1939.

[00:34:24]He was arrested, investigated and appeared as a witness at Nuremberg.

[00:34:28]Charges against him were dropped and he was released on April 27th 1948.

[00:34:33]He wrote two books about the Waffen SS and its operations on the Eastern Front.

[00:34:37]In 1953, five years after his release, he was recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency to help establish the Gesellschaft für Wehrkunde, a defense studies organization that functioned as a Cold War information and analysis body.

[00:34:50]The general Hitler screamed about in the bunker ended up working for American intelligence.

[00:34:55]He died in Munich on May 12th, 1966. He is buried at the Perlacher forced cemetery.

[00:35:01]Veterans of the Waffen SS attended his funeral. Eric Wallin, whose memoir preserved Steiner's speech to the Nordland soldiers in the Pomeranian winter, survived the war.

[00:35:11]He escaped Berlin in May 1945 disguised as an Italian refugee alongside his fellow Swede Hans Gösta Persson, crossed two Soviet checkpoints without being identified, reached the Elbe River, and crossed into British-controlled territory.

[00:35:27]He wrote his account in Swedish and had it published in Buenos Aires, where the distance from Europe made publication possible.

[00:35:34]The book is called Twilight of the Gods.

[00:35:36]Its title describes exactly what it records, the end of something that had been burning long enough that most of the men who started it were already gone.

[00:35:44]There is one more thing that belongs at the end of this story.

[00:35:47]The men who followed Steiner in February 1945 were not German.

[00:35:51]The soldiers who drove to Arnswalde, who held the corridor open for the civilians to come out, who faced Bogdanov's Second Guards Tank Army on the flat fields of Pomerania, were Danes and Norwegians and Flemings and Swedes.

[00:36:03]They had come from countries that were not at war with the Soviet Union. Their governments had not sent them.

[00:36:08]They had made individual decisions that had put them here at the end of the world they had known, fighting in freezing mud for a cause that had already been lost when Steiner told them it had been lost.

[00:36:19]What they were fighting for by then was not an idea. Ideologies do not sustain men through four years of the Eastern Front. What sustains them is the man beside them and the officer in front of them. The specific network of obligation and shared experience that forms between soldiers who have been in the same positions long enough to stop being strangers. By February 1945, the men of Nordland had been keeping each other alive for years.

[00:36:43]They had earned the right to fight for each other rather than for any cause that could be stated in a speech. And they exercised [snorts] that right in the last offensive action the formation would ever make.

[00:36:53]Steiner had told them the truth about the war. He had been telling them the truth since 1941.

[00:36:58]That was why they attacked when he said attack and why they followed him when retreat was the rational option.

[00:37:03]And why they trusted him when he said this was the last battle. It was the last battle. They fought to the end.

[00:37:10]Most of them died in it one way or another in Pomerania or in Berlin or in Soviet captivity in the years that followed. The ones who made it home came back to countries that had no language for what they had been or what they had done.

[00:37:21]This is the battle of the Occident. The wall has fallen. This is the last battle.

[00:37:26]We must fight to the end.

[00:37:28]Steiner said those words and the men who heard him went out and attacked and changed the timeline of the war's final chapter without intending to.

[00:37:35]Then they retreated.

[00:37:37]Then they fought in Berlin.

[00:37:40]Then most of them were gone.

[00:37:42]The wall had fallen a long time before he said it had. He was the last person in the chain of command to say it out loud. And he said it to the soldiers who were going to pay for it rather than to the man in the bunker who could not hear it.