I checked my group; none had been wounded. We had been very lucky. We had lacked hand grenades to reach the dead corner of the embankment. Had the Russians had some, they would have had the advantage, and none of us would have survived the attack. We did not know how many trains had got away safely during the fight. The sappers emerged from their shelter with relief, and the company sent us reinforcements.
We checked out the ground in front of us. To our right, about 50 paces from the bridge, there was a building at the foot of the embankment. We carefully examined the ground on this side. The Russians had in fact withdrawn under cover of darkness. We found neither dead nor wounded. Had the Russians taken their comrades with them? Only a Maxim machine gun recalled the event. It stood on a flat bit of land in front of the embankment and the Russians had not been able to bring it into action. With its outdated two-wheeled carriage it looked like a toy. We found no ammunition near it. Presumably the Russians had taken shelter in the dead corner of the embankment and had then pulled out along the Warthe.
The Russians had certainly pulled out but we suspected they were still close. At the moment they would be busy reassembling, seeing to the wounded and reloading their sub-machine guns. We had to prepare for a second attack in case they came again.
Our chief wanted to do something about the Russians. He ordered Sergeant Max Langheinrich to form a storm troop to track down and destroy them. I was included with my section. We numbered about 20 men. Langheinrich took the lead and I was to cover the rear with René and Hans Hof to prevent the Russians finishing us off. As a base, as well as the start and return point for the enterprise, we had picked a primitive, empty, corrugated-iron hut at the foot of the north side of the embankment. It was 4 x 4 metres in size, with a man-high shrapnel-proof wall around it, and it lay within 100 metres of the bridge. Before setting off, we held a short council of war. We would first go a little way towards the street underpass and then turn and comb through the land north of the embankment in a half circle, finishing at the bridge and the corrugated-iron hut.
It could not have been very late, perhaps 2000 or 2100 hours. After a half-hour pause in the hut, we set off towards the underpass. In spread-out file we tramped along the north side of the embankment. It had long since given up raining, but the night was quite dark and one had to take care not to lose sight of the man in front.
After a few minutes Langheinrich gathered the storm troop together. We left the embankment and began circling round to the north. We came to some railway sidings. Were these factory sidings or a goods station? We stumbled over heaps of coal, then knee-high points control wires again. Every few minutes someone fell flat on his face, every time with much noise and swearing.
On the left-hand side, still near the embankment, a large black cube appeared out of the darkness. It was a corrugated-iron hall, a store about 20 metres long. I told René that I would check the hall and that he should wait for me. Inside it was completely dark. I found a large store of empty petrol barrels. I carefully climbed over the barrels and found no Russians, but at the far end of the hall in a small room between the barrels and the corrugated iron I found some stacks of books. I took some with me with the intention of returning to the hall in daylight if I could.
René and I then hastened to rejoin the group. We could not see our comrades, only hear them. They were not creeping across but trampling through the terrain. Before we could join up with them there was a sudden burst of sub-machine-gun fire from up ahead. Russians! I saw sparks of fire apparently ricocheting off a roadway.
I pulled my head in and waited about ten minutes until the Russians quietened down. When I got up again, my comrades had vanished. I carefully crept on towards the Warthe. It was lighter near the river with weak light reflected from the west. I caught sight of a small railway hut in front of which several men were standing. I took them for Russians at first as they were wearing Russian steel helmets, but as I got closer I could hear German being spoken loud and clear.
I quickly made myself known. I had stumbled across a group of Volkssturm men, old men unaware of their careless behaviour. They could not answer my question about my comrades. They had not seen them. Then they recounted the events of the day to me, the shock of which they had yet to overcome.
While we were talking, about 1 or 2 kilometres off to our right a Russian tank fired across the Warthe and the Oder and scored a direct hit on an electricity transformer or high voltage cable. There was a fantastic blue-yellow arc of light and then the few lights on in that part of the town west of the Oder went out as one. A little later a Stalin-Organ to the north of us fired a salvo to the west. I saw the fire trails, heard the well-known howling, and clearly heard the aftermath.
There were four or five Volkssturm men that I had met in front of the little corrugated-iron hut. They were wearing dark overcoats and had rifles dangling from their shoulders. Why they of all people should have been stationed at this position remained unclear to me. They had not taken cover, despite the firing nearby.
They told me that during the day the Russians had overrun a 37mm flak position and killed the crew of Luftwaffe auxiliaries. I asked about the penetration by Russian tanks into the town centre. Everyone had been surprised and it had happened without warning. Several tanks carrying infantry had taken part and three of these tanks had been destroyed by Panzerfausts.
In the opinion of the Volkssturm men, the Russians had withdrawn to the Cellulose Factory, which lay a bit to the north of here. I could see the buildings as dark shadows. With this new information I carefully made my way back to the Warthe bridge without encountering either Russians or Germans. About an hour after the exchange of fire I returned to our base. I was greeted with ‘Hello’ by my comrades. After me appeared ‘Max’ [Walter Schulz]. He too was unwounded.
But our storm troop undertaking had cost some wounded, including René. He had already been taken to a dressing station. No one could tell me what kind of wound he had, nor could I discover where he had been taken. I was angry and sad. My best friend! I would miss him a lot. I did not know then that I would never see him again.[11]
This Soviet attack encouraged the work on the defences, as the following account shows:
When Russian tanks reached Küstrin on the 31st January 1945, my father, Johannes Dawidowski, and his brother Otto had to follow orders and do their duty with the Küstrin Volkssturm. Until then both men had been free of military obligations. They were rated as ‘exempt’, as both of them worked in an important war industry, the Küstrin Oder-Hütte iron foundry.
Until the first penetration of the Neustadt by enemy tanks only a few measures had been taken to prepare for an effective defence, so the Volkssturm were first put to the construction of defences of every kind. While the Wehrmacht dug in and fought along the curve around the Neustadt and near Alt Bleyen, the work of the Volkssturm was in the Altstadt, digging foxholes on the old Oder fortifications from Bastion Philipp to Bastion König. Other Volkssturm dug positions on the Gorin and on the edge of the glacis. A deep anti-tank ditch with bulwarks was constructed at the crossroads in front of the Kietz Gate. At the southern exit of Kietz anti-tank barriers were erected out of all kinds of agricultural machinery driven together and felled trees.[12]
11
Kohlase [Band 4], pp. 29–35. Schmidt’s unit was the 8th Bty, IInd Battalion, Flak Regiment 14, 23rd Flak Division. The railway sidings he mentioned were part of the Potato Meal Factory (Norddeutschen Kartoffel-Mehlfabrik), Küstrin’s largest employer of labour.