From my perspective in the trenches, the position, apart from some buildings that should have been blown up, was an ideal one in which to spend the winter. Not a spadeful more could be dug out of the frozen ground. The Powielin position, with its trenches in places only knee deep, bore no comparison to this one. But I had no feeling of confidence. Even though I had no overview of the wider situation, I did not reckon on staying there long.
My feeling had not deceived me. After sleeping for a few hours in deep exhaustion I had woken up. At dawn I emerged from the bunker. The houses in front of the position, 50 metres away, made me nervous. As it came light, movement could be seen. It turned out that there were some individual Russians in the houses and that more were moving in. In ones and twos they came running over the bridge which led over a stream on the other side of the farmyard. I had the machine-gun spray the bridge, whereupon in the background a movement to the left, along the stream, could be seen. After quite a long time, individual rifle fire sounded from the neighbouring sector to our left. The direction of it moved more and more obliquely to the rear in our direction of retreat. While it was gradually becoming light, the enemy were also advancing on the right about one kilometre away. We were threatened with encirclement. Our neighbours on both sides crumbled. They left their trenches and withdrew, widely separated.
The battalion commander, Hauptmann Wild, could not decide to evacuate that magnificent position without orders. There was neither telephone nor wireless connection to our Regiment. In view of the threatened encirclement it seemed crazy to stay in the position. Behind it stretched several kilometres of open plain, offering no kind of protection. To withdraw across it in daylight would involve heavy casualties. No runner came from the Regiment who might have brought the order we were waiting for. The pale day brightened and the rifle fire behind us to the left became more concentrated.
Hauptmann Wild waited and brooded. To surrender the position without the enemy attacking was a decision with far-reaching consequences. Even apart from the possibility of court martial proceedings, the order to evacuate meant giving up trenches and bunkers of such good quality as we had never had before. Even if the enemy had dug in on the other slope of the bank only 100 or 150 metres away, this would still not have been any ‘close-quarters corner’ such as we had in October in the Budy-Obrebski position. At the company commanders’ meeting I pressed for the order to withdraw to be given. I pointed out that otherwise, if there were any further delay, the battalion of nearly 150 men would be lost. Hauptmann Wild came to his decision. We climbed out of the trenches and moved off over the wide, snow-covered field.
While the battalion was retreating in open order, suddenly bursts of fire from machine-guns and machine-pistols hit the right flank. There were Russians in a small trench system, not 30 metres away from me. Men hit by the bullets were collapsing all around. One cried out that we should take him with us. Who could have done that? Everybody was running, and in long jumping strides I ran along with them. Then suddenly there was a blow against my head. As I was running, I was spun round. I fell, and pulled myself together again. My head was thumping, but I felt that I was not wounded. Stumbling, I ran on, zig-zagging across the expanse when there was no cover.
After some 100 metres the commanders were able to bring their units under control and to change the running flight into an orderly retreat. At the end of the fields lay the next settlement. A machine-pistol barked out from there and a voice, going haywire, was shouting out. Both weapon and voice belonged to Oberst Dorn, who was firing in the air over our heads in order to halt the retreating troops and bring them into their positions. ‘You Schweinehunde, will you stand still!’ he roared, although this was not necessary. I had never seen the Oberst, this quiet and kindly man, so excited. Clearly he had not seen and did not know anything of the retreat of our neighbouring units and nothing of the enemy machine-gun fire that had hit us from the flank as we were retreating. But the Oberst was fair and experienced enough to immediately grasp the situation and not to hold us responsible for it. He knew that in the sixth year of the war the troops were already too worn out to be able to make anything of a situation such as this.
Lengthy retreats demoralise any troops, as had been seen in the summer of 1944. There on the Russian front was added a massive momentum not present on the other fronts, apart perhaps from the partisan war in the Balkans. It was the fear of being taken prisoner, the fear of falling into the hands of an inhuman enemy. Goebbels’ propaganda had a boomerang effect. The bitterness with which the war was waged against Bolshevik Russia marked it out as a struggle between personal deadly enemies. The disregard of the Red Cross, the news of the atrocities carried out by the advancing Red Army, all this had long since extinguished the chivalry practised in earlier wars. However, it seemed to be still present on the other fronts in the West and South. Two ideologies were battling it out. The protagonists knew that the conflict would only end with the destruction of one or the other. In the East it had never been a decent war.
One notable thing was that on the evening of 17 January 1945, quite against my usual careless custom, I had put on my steel helmet instead of my field service cap. An indeterminate but compelling feeling had made me do it. When I was at last able to take off my steel helmet I saw the reason for it. The bludgeoning blow, that had thrown me to the ground, came from an infantry gun. It had very nearly penetrated the helmet, but the inserts of sheet steel and leather had stopped it from going right through.
From the beginning of the large-scale offensive on the 14th until the 20th January we had carried out a fighting withdrawal of almost 70 kilometres. We had to take up positions in front of the little town of Bielsk. Since only the commander, Hauptmann Wild, had a map, the process of directing us in to our positions was a very long-winded affair. Also, the allocation of sectors did not seem to be quite right. Wild drove for a long time in a regimental vehicle around the district in order to find the right sector. We had to shift sideways. He had already directed away half the battalion, then went to find it and did not come back.
The Adjutant, Oberleutnant Küllenberg, and I remained behind, as the only officers, with the other half of the battalion. It was a bright and sunny winter’s day with good visibility over a long distance. We were standing on the top of a gentle rise, parallel to which, and some 700 metres to the left, to the south, ran the road to Bielsk, 4 kilometres away. To the right of it, one to two kilometres further on, at a right angle to the first road, another road led to the town. Two small areas of woodland lay between. On the latter road, which could not easily be observed, enemy tanks were advancing, to judge by the noise they were making, But on the left, one brown lorry after another, carrying anti-tank guns or infantry, rolled in the direction of Bielsk.
Küllenberg and I considered our position. As it later turned out, a battalion runner sent by Hauptmann Wild had not got through. In the meantime it had got to 3pm. Getting on for 30 lorries had already driven past us and on the right, to judge by the noise, at least as many tanks. So our only option was to withdraw, to lie up in the nearest woodland and to wait for the approaching darkness. In two hours it would be dusk and after that it would quickly become dark. To the woodland it was one kilometre, in between there was a village. We moved through it in column, widely separated. The few inhabitants, mostly old people, observed us with indifferent faces. They may have felt pleased that we were retreating, but also uncertain as to what was going to happen. Not far behind the village we reached the protection of the woodland. Russians travelling to Bielsk on the road to the left of us seemed to have a definite destination. Although they must have been able to see us, they left us alone. Possibly they thought that we were their own people. That gave me an idea.