The Rise of the Third Reich

On June 6, June 7 and June 8, the front line in Warsaw seemed relatively calm. Neither the German army nor the Soviet army launched an offensive, but seized the time to mobilize their troops.

Although the German 6th Army has received a lot of reinforcements, it will take several days for these troops to be in place. Before that, Model could only endure and continue to be a coward in Warsaw.

For the Soviet army, the most important thing now is to open up the railway and main road communication lines from Brest to Warsaw. In this way, more troops and baggage can be transported to the front line in Warsaw as quickly as possible.

At the same time, such a straight traffic line is also very easy to protect, much easier than the current traffic line with twists and turns.

Therefore, Comrade Solzhenitsyn's 4th Army was sent to attack another ring fortress. However, Solzhenitsyn's artillery reconnaissance platoon did not work as coolies to carry 203mm artillery shells this time. They got a very lucrative job, helping comrades of the Polish Bolshevik Party to establish grassroots political power, and at the same time confiscating some Polish landlords and rich peasants. Horses, cattle and sheep, sausages, butter, cheese, vegetables and wine... Well, this is not because the Red Army's logistics supply is insufficient. The war has just begun. No matter how bad the Soviet Union is, it will not have enough food now. Can supply the front line.

However, the Soviet Red Army has a tradition of confiscation. If they don’t talk about anything, they don’t take a needle and a thread. If they don’t take anything, how can they revolutionize it? So they always get nothing wherever they hit. And where are the logistical supplies confiscated in Poland? Poland has always been the breadbasket of Europe, with a lot of delicious food!

"The village here looks very wealthy!" Solzhenitsyn rode a horse confiscated from somewhere and walked at the front of the team with a Polish Bolshevik cadre who had just been released from a Siberian labor camp. , and I was still doing some idle work all the way.

In the five days before setting foot on the territory of White Poland, Solzhenitsyn was busy marching and fighting, and did not pay much attention to the suffering Polish people. But in the past two days, he switched to "local work" and discovered that the Polish countryside west of the Bug River was very wealthy. The houses are beautifully renovated, and there is plenty of food in them, and every household has some industrial products that look obviously better than Soviet goods in terms of workmanship. Such as clocks, bicycles, radios, cameras, etc.

In addition, both men and women are dressed decently and have very rosy complexions. It is impossible to tell who is a working people in dire straits.

Oh, it’s not like there aren’t people who look like working people. Comrade Lewandowski, a cadre of the Polish Bolshevik Party who is now working with Solzhenitsyn, looks very bitter at first glance. He is very thin, with prominent cheekbones on his face, a somewhat hunched back, and one arm that is not very strong. Conveniently, it is said that he was injured while working - Solzhenitsyn guessed that this Pole must have been a serf in a landlord's family when he was young.

"Poland is not rich," Lewandowski shook his head and said in a hoarse voice, "The rural areas of Switzerland are rich. You will know when Switzerland is liberated in the future."

Of course, the working people of Switzerland who are in dire straits will also be liberated. According to the plan, it will be after the liberation of Germany. Now the Third International is looking for Swiss revolutionaries who want to be great leaders to form the Swiss Bolshevik Party.

"Switzerland? Have you been to Switzerland?" Solzhenitsyn was stunned.

"Yes, I studied abroad in Switzerland when I was young." Lewandowski sighed and said with some emotion, "I came into contact with Marxism at the Federal University of Technology in Zurich."

Studying in Switzerland? It turns out that he is not a serf, so how come he looks so progressive? Solzhenitsyn took a closer look at the bitter-looking Polish comrade.

When Lewandowski mentioned ETH Zurich, his eye circles turned red for some reason and he stopped talking, as if he was thinking of something sad. Solzhenitsyn guessed that this cadre of the Polish Bolshevik Party must have suffered a lot in Switzerland...

…

"Comrade squad leader, have you seen Warsaw?"

"I saw it! I saw the buildings belonging to Warsaw City! Comrades, we have arrived at the foot of Warsaw City!"

In a small town called Suleovic, only 17 or 18 kilometers away from the center of Warsaw, Yakov Pavlov, the machine gun squad leader of the 1st Company of the 205th Infantry Division Reconnaissance Battalion of the Red Army, was on the roof of a Catholic church. , saw the city of Warsaw in the distance for the first time.

The 205th Division of the Red Army, now assigned to the 12th Group Army of the Red Army, now replaces the 9th Mechanized Army and becomes the vanguard of the advance towards Warsaw. Even when the main force was resting from June 6th to 8th, they did not stop advancing. Instead, they advanced from Minsk in Poland to Suleovic, which can be regarded as the gateway to Warsaw. This will be the starting point for the Red Army's final attack on Warsaw City!

Although the terrain of Suleovic was important, contrary to the expectations of the commander of the 205th Division, Major General Zoludev and the political commissar Oktyabryski, the march to Suleovic went very smoothly, with almost no German attacks. The resistance was limited to several bombings on the road and the loss of dozens of soldiers and a dozen vehicles. Oh, it was not that there was no resistance. When entering Suleovic, a dozen vicious Polish reactionaries shot at Red Army soldiers with rifles, killing 2 people and injuring 3 others.

Now the 205th Division is searching for reactionaries throughout the city, and Pavlov's machine gun squad was ordered to break into the largest church in Suleovic to arrest the reactionaries - the Catholic forces in Poland have always been anti-G and anti-Soviet. All the pioneers, including bishops and priests, should be captured and sent to Siberia for labor reform.

However, Pavlov and others did not catch a single magician in this empty cathedral. It turned out that these people had retreated on the order of the Archbishop of Warsaw.

"Comrade division commander, comrade political commissar."

Pavlov was stretching his neck to look at the scenery when he heard someone behind him calling "division commander" and "political commissar". He knew it must be the two bosses of the 205th Division. He quickly turned around and saw Major General Zoludev and Political Commissar Oktyabrski walking into the attic where he was - this is the commanding heights of the entire city of Suleovic, and you can see the city of Warsaw from here. Many tall buildings.

"Salute!" Pavlov gave a military salute, and then left quietly. He did not dare to disturb the division commander and political commissar comrades to observe the enemy's situation.

"Comrade Political Commissar, Warsaw is right in front of us!" Major General Victor Zorudev, commander of the 205th Division, observed with a telescope for a while, and then said to Oktyabryski beside him, "What is blocking us now? It’s just a large forest... The Polish reactionaries knew that their country was undefendable, so they kept a large forest east of Warsaw and wanted to use trees to block the wheel of history. It’s really ridiculous.”

Poland is a landform of a great plain, but it is not a "treeless plain", but a plain covered with forests. Before being developed, the Polish plain was a large temperate forest. The forest east of Warsaw has always been a place for hunting and recreation by Polish monarchs, so it has not been cut down on a large scale.

After Piłsudski came to power, because he knew that Su Bo would have a battle, he put national defense first in everything, including tree felling. The forest east of Warsaw is a "protected area" where logging is prohibited because it can protect the city of Warsaw. Moreover, in this forest east of Warsaw, Piłsudski also had a large number of fortifications built. Any road that passes through the forest, whether it is a highway, railway or other road, is blocked by layers of defensive positions.

The Red Army Intelligence Bureau had already found out about this situation. The road into Warsaw from the east is not easy!

If the Germans were prepared to defend Warsaw, then the "Warsaw Forest" would certainly be the place where the bloody battle would begin.

…

Private Willy Brandt, from the 2nd Platoon of the 3rd Company of the 406th Regiment of the 111th Army Infantry Division of the German Wehrmacht, was half-kneeling in depression in an infantry fortification near the city of Suleovic in the Warsaw forest, holding his arms A MKB42 automatic carbine with a cigarette hanging from his mouth.

Unlike the high-morale German superhuman warriors around him, Brandt was actually an anti-war activist. He was an illegitimate son, his original name was Herbert Ernst Carl Fram, and he was raised by his maternal grandfather who believed in the Social Democratic Party. Under the influence of his grandfather, he joined the Socialist Youth League at the age of 15 and became a member of the Social Democratic Party in 1930. But not long after, German militarists united with the Nazi Party to seize power, and also passed the "Transformational Justice Regulations" to politically pursue the anti-war Social Democrats and Bolsheviks.

Frum, who was extremely disappointed with German politics, left Germany under the pseudonym Brandt and went to Norway, where he joined the Norwegian Workers' Party and became a journalist. He published an article specifically in the Norwegian "Worker's Daily" to speak ill of Hitler's government. In 1937, he also participated in the Spanish Civil War as a war correspondent, reporting on the atrocities of the fascists.

But in 1940, something happened that made him feel desperate. Germany defeated France and became the dominant force on the European continent, while the Norwegian Workers' Party was banned by the National Unity Party, which came to power in a coup. However, Brandt was not arrested, but received a draft notice from the Military Service Bureau of the German Ministry of Defense. He originally wanted to seek refuge in Sweden, but Swedish customs informed him that he had to present a document exempting him from military service in order to enter the country legally.

In order to avoid going to jail or being sent to a concentration camp, Brandt had no choice but to report to the German Military Service Office in Norway and became a criminal Nazi German soldier - the German Military Service did not know that he was a rebel. Brandt, a militant, only thinks of him as Fram, a German citizen living in Norway. However, if he refuses to serve and is arrested, other crimes may be exposed, and he will go to a concentration camp for reform through labor.