ABSTRACT
By now we have left the troops of Lasch and Gollnick bottled up in Königsberg and Samland, and the German Fourth Army isolated and imprisoned against the shore of the Frisches Haff. The right-hand German formation in the Baltic theatre was the Second Army, which had caught almost the whole weight of the 2nd Belorussian Front when Marshal Rokossovskii opened his offensive on 14 January. On 20 January STAVKA swung the axis of Rokossovskii’s effort from the north-north-west to the north (seep. 170). The thrust to Elbing fragmented the Second Army, whose left-hand formations were cut off with the Fourth Army to the east of the breakthrough. These happenings, which were so destructive to the Germans in one dimension, nevertheless weakened the westward momentum of the Russian January offensive and permitted the Germans, in however confused a way, to gather their forces and recover the initiative.
