In January 1945, the Soviet Union launched a series of massive offensives into German-held Polish territory. The attacks led to the capture of Warsaw and Krakow and, against weak German opposition, carried Soviet forces into East Prussia and Silesia, eventually threatening Berlin itself.
By February 1945, Soviet spearheads halted after advancing 300 miles west. The new front line stood only 43 miles from Hitler's bunker. In the process, the German forces opposing them were smashed or forced to retreat, though they fought stubbornly and inflicted heavy casualties on the Soviets.
The stubborn resistance in East Prussia and Silesia, combined with strong German forces still on the Soviet flank in Pomerania, forced Stalin to delay his planned assault on Berlin until mid-April 1945. This bought Hitler a few weeks to try to stabilize the line and build up forces for the renewed Soviet attack.
Some of the German shortfall in manpower was filled by the Volkssturm, essentially a badly armed civilian militia of old soldiers, men with medical problems that had kept them out of the draft, and young boys from the Hitler Youth, who were often fanatical in their resistance.
The town of Hindenburg in Upper Silesia was an industrial center that had gradually changed from a Polish character to a German one, including its name. It had originally been annexed by Prussia some 200 years earlier and renamed in honor of Germany's World War One field marshal Paul von Hindenburg in 1915.
One of the units defending the town was the 1st Company, Hindenburg Volkssturm Battalion, a formation of Hitler Youths and older men under the command of SA Sturmführer Fritz Zacks, or Zaksa depending on which contemporary newspaper report you consult. Zacks was reportedly a veteran World War One officer and a minor Nazi official.
He deployed his men to fend off a Soviet assault on the town by some 30 T-34 tanks plus infantry. The attack was one of dozens on small German towns and villages along the front in the second week of February. Soviet tanks advanced from the direction of Gleiwitz and Oringen, where they were confronted by Zacks and his men.
Among them was a 16-year-old Hitler Youth named Günter Nowak. The Volkssturm ambushed the T-34s using Panzerfaust rockets, each of Zacks's men apparently carrying four of these cheap but very effective shaped-charge weapons into the fight. They battled from cellar windows and other prepared positions among the houses.
The fighting took place over two days and a night. During that time, Zacks destroyed four Soviet tanks, and Nowak was reported to have destroyed between nine and eleven enemy tanks, two of which were huge Joseph Stalin heavy tanks.
This was what SA Sturmführer Zacks recounted to the Feldgendarmerie military police who picked him up shortly afterward some distance from Hindenburg. Zacks had no official reason to be away from his unit. In the febrile atmosphere of the bloody end of the Third Reich, deserters were found hanging from trees and lampposts all over Germany, and the military police and other Nazi organizations were empowered to play judge and jury over any suspects they apprehended.
But Zacks's story was so impressive and its details so fascinating that instead of being strung up, the Gendarmerie delivered Zacks to the local Gauleitung headquarters at Ziegenhals, where the middle-aged World War One veteran breathlessly repeated his story to senior Nazi Party officials. It was a propaganda gift: a 16-year-old boy destroying almost half a dozen Soviet tanks single-handed.
Higher headquarters needed to know. Accordingly, that same day the Gauleitung sent a précis of Zacks's story to none other than Martin Bormann, chief of the Nazi Party Chancellery, in charge of all Gauleiters. Because the Volkssturm came under the authority of the party and not the army, Bormann also had administrative authority over the Volkssturm.
Bormann read the teleprinter message with great interest. Good news like this was rather thin on the ground in February 1945. Bormann, who was also Hitler's personal secretary, brought the affair before the Führer himself, who was also transfixed by the story.
It was decided to make a big deal out of the incident. On the Führer's express order, Zacks was awarded the German Cross in Gold immediately for his destruction of four Soviet tanks and also awarded four Panzer Destruction Badges. Nowak, the 16-year-old Panzerknacker, was to receive Germany's premier military award, the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross. He would be the youngest recipient in the history of the award.
Presumably Hitler would want to decorate Nowak personally in Berlin, similarly to how he was filmed for propaganda reasons a month later distributing Iron Cross Second Classes and wound badges to Hitler Youths outside his Berlin bunker. These youngsters had all distinguished themselves in Volkssturm units against the Soviets, many having knocked out Soviet tanks with Panzerfausts.
Accordingly, Dr. Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry took over the story, generating several news articles about Nowak's courage and daring in an effort to help stiffen national morale at a difficult time. The 17th Army, to which the Hindenburg Volkssturm battalion was attached, sent out an order that Nowak was to report to headquarters at once.
But Nowak never reported in. Despite increasingly desperate calls from both the 17th Army and the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, for four weeks the 17th Army received demands from Bormann to produce Nowak so that he could receive his Knight's Cross from the Führer. For four weeks, no one at 17th Army could locate Private Nowak.
Eventually the penny dropped. Bormann and Hitler had been duped. Who had hoodwinked them? None other than Fritz Zacks, the local Volkssturm commander. Grabbed by a Feldgendarmerie checkpoint far from where he was supposed to have been, and realizing that he faced summary execution for desertion, Zacks had invented a tale of daring-do so outrageous that it was almost believable, certainly to a higher command desperate for heroic stories to pass on to the frightened and exhausted public.
The story had taken on a life of its own until it had reached the highest office in the land and been believed. Zacks got his medal and disappeared into the chaos that was the Eastern Front. Once Bormann and the army realized the truth, perhaps Zacks was found and subsequently dealt with.
As for Hitler Youth Nowak, the Propaganda Ministry appears to have circumvented any embarrassment by putting out a rumor that Nowak had been captured by the Soviets before he could receive his Knight's Cross. Many post-war books picked up on this lie by stating that Nowak had died in Soviet captivity, when no evidence actually exists that such a hero was ever more than a figment thrown out of the imagination of a man desperate to save his own neck.
Indeed, so powerful is this story that even today many publications still list Nowak as the youngest Knight's Cross holder of World War II, demonstrating that a Nazi propaganda piece still lives on over 70 years after the end of World War II.