On 15 February 1945 German troops attacked south from the area of Stargard in Pomerania, today Stargard in north-western Poland. Operation Solstice, in German Unternehmen Sonnenwende, was aimed at the long northern flank of Marshal Georgy Zhukov's 1st Belorussian Front, which had raced from the Vistula to the Oder in January. The attack broke through to the surrounded German garrison of Arnswalde, but Soviet resistance and counterattacks soon stopped it, and on 18 February the Germans called it off. Its real effect was felt on the other side of the line: worried about a blow from Pomerania, the Soviet command chose to clear the region before turning on Berlin.
A wedge to the Oder
In January 1945 the Soviet winter offensive broke the German front on the Vistula and drove west across Poland. By 31 January Soviet tank and shock troops had reached the Oder near Küstrin, today Kostrzyn nad Odrą, on the direct road to Berlin. The speed of the advance left Zhukov's front overstretched, with a long northern flank facing Pomerania.1
General Heinz Guderian saw a chance to cut that spearhead off. He proposed a two-pronged counterattack east of the Oder, but Hitler opted for a single thrust out of the Stargard area. The offensive belonged to Army Group Vistula, commanded by Heinrich Himmler. On 13 February Guderian, in Hitler's presence, demanded that his deputy, General Walther Wenck, be given a special mandate to command it; Hitler sent Wenck to the army group but did not define his authority, which in practice took the final decision away from Himmler without clearly giving it to Wenck.2
The attack from Stargard
The attack fell to the Eleventh Army of the SS general Felix Steiner, often called the 11th SS Panzer Army. It was organized in three groups: the XXXIX Panzer Corps on the right, the III SS Panzer Corps with the foreign volunteer divisions Nordland, Nederland and Langemarck in the center, and Corps Group Munzel on the left. Many units were still arriving, and fuel and ammunition were short. Ziemke's U.S. Army history counts two corps headquarters and ten divisions, seven of them panzer divisions, scraped together for the offensive; by 10 February less than half of the trains carrying them had arrived.3
On 15 February only part of the force was ready. The III SS Panzer Corps, led by the Nordland division, struck south from the area of Suchań toward Arnswalde, today Choszczno, where German troops, many of them wounded, and a large number of civilians had been cut off. The other two groups joined the attack on 16 February. They gained a few kilometers, but the Soviet 2nd Guards Tank Army stopped them well short of their objectives.4
Stopped in three days
The rest of the attacking army wasted 16 February feeling out the enemy. That night, on the way back from a conference with Hitler, Wenck was severely injured in a car accident. Rain and mud kept the tanks to the roads, and minefields and strong antitank defenses stopped the attack; on the night of 18 February, after gains of at most two to three miles, Himmler called the offensive off. By then Zhukov had turned two tank armies north.5
Local fighting went on for several more days as Soviet attacks grew stronger. Arnswalde was soon under attack again, and around 22 and 23 February the Germans gave the town up and fell back behind the Ina River. The sources even differ on when the attackers first reached the town, on 15 or on 17 February.6
Why it mattered
As a military operation Solstice was a failure. It did, however, feed Soviet fears of a larger German strike from Pomerania into Zhukov's flank, and the Soviet command decided to secure that flank first by clearing Pomerania; Ziemke notes that the Stavka's decision to halt the winter offensive coincided with the Stargard attack. The Stargard historian Jerzy Tatoń writes that the German aim had been to delay the attack on Berlin by four to six weeks.7
In early March the Red Army took Stargard itself, and only on 16 April did Zhukov launch his final attack across the Oder. The final battle is told in our article on the Battle of Berlin, and the Soviet commander's career in our portrait of Georgy Zhukov.8
