Watch this rare WWII color footage depicting German soldiers, mostly teens, on the Oder front, 60 Km from Berlin, moments before the attack of the Red Army.
In the wake of the successful Operation Bagration, the 1st Belorussian Front managed to secure two bridgeheads west of the Vistula river between 27 July and 4 August 1944. The Soviets remained inactive during the failed Warsaw uprising that started on 1 August, though their frontline was not far from the insurgents. The 1st Ukrainian Front captured an additional large bridgehead at Sandomierz (known as the Baranow bridgehead in German accounts), some 200 km south of Warsaw, during the Lvov-Sandomierz Offensive.
Preceding the offensive, the Soviets had built up large amounts of materiel and manpower in the three bridgeheads. The Soviets greatly outnumbered the opposing German army in infantry, artillery, and armour. All this was known to German intelligence. General Reinhard Gehlen, head of Fremde Heere Ost passed his assessment to Heinz Guderian. Guderian in turn presented the intelligence results to Adolf Hitler, who refused to believe them, dismissing the apparent Soviet strength as “the greatest imposture since Genghis Khan”.[6] Guderian had proposed to evacuate the divisions of Army Group Northtrapped in the Courland Pocket to the Reich via the Baltic Sea to get the necessary manpower for the defence, but Hitler forbade it. In addition, Hitler commanded that one major operational reserve, the troops of Sepp Dietrich’s 6th SS Panzer Army, be moved to Hungary to support Operation Frühlingserwachen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6FQa2CcDqs