So at the end of October 1944 I travelled to Küstrin as my labour service came to an end, registered with the police and was conscripted and posted to Engineer Replacement & Training Battalion 68, which was in the same Engineer Barracks as my father’s company. I could thus visit my parents almost daily during my training without having to leave the barracks. However, on the 30th January 1945 my mother left Küstrin at my father’s insistence and went to stay with her sister-in-law in central Germany.
The soldiers in my company were split up and sent to various places, but this did not apply to the 21 officer cadets of the reserve, of which I was one. We remained in the barracks for the time being and came directly under the Army High Command, as I heard.
On the 31st January tank shells suddenly burst on the parade ground; the Russians were there. That night we 21 young soldiers received orders to go to the village of Tamsel, where a nervous second lieutenant had lost his gun. We tried in vain to drive back the suddenly attacking enemy and recover the gun. After the attack, we gathered alongside a building. I went into the building, saw someone standing there and asked: ‘What unit are you?’ He said something that I did not understand. It sounded like: ‘Ruki werch!’ I saw in the darkness that he had no steel helmet, but a fur hat, and thought for a minute that he might be one of the Vlassov soldiers that were fighting alongside us in Küstrin. Then I suddenly realised that he was a Soviet soldier, that he had a sub-machine gun pointed at me and was calling on me in his language to put my hands up.
We were at the most 5 metres apart. I had my rifle slung over my shoulder and knew that I had no chance of getting out of this situation scot-free. So I was to become a Soviet prisoner, something that we all feared. I therefore had to do something unexpected. I slowly turned around and without a word slowly strode to the corner of the building. The Russian’s killer instinct matched mine. He shot first as I rounded the corner. Under cover of darkness, all of us got away from this first brush with the enemy. Only one had a shot right through the heel of his boot that did not hurt him and raised the astonishment of the others in the barracks next morning.[18]
Despite the thick cloud, Colonel Hans-Ulrich Rudel’s famous tank-busting squadron of Stukas, flying out of Neuendorf-im-Sande, immediately north of Fürstenwalde, attacked the Soviet positions in Kienitz that first day with bombs, cannon and machine-gun fire to such effect that the Soviets hastened to bring forwards anti-aircraft guns and get them across to the west bank.[19]
Meanwhile in Küstrin the flak was arriving piecemeal, some of the gun crews, including Hitler Youth auxiliaries, being ferried in by Berlin’s double-decker buses. Some crews with 20mm and 37mm guns on carriages were allocated to the Altstadt’s Warthe bank and others were sent to support the main battle line that was being formed. By nightfall there was no sound of combat anywhere, and the first continuous front line could be formed undisturbed on either side of the Warthe, running in a half circle around the Neustadt from the Oder via Drewitz and the Stadtwald (town woods), and across the training grounds in front of the infantry barracks to Warnick on the Warthe.
Late in the evening the Volkssturm men who were believed to be missing returned from the direction of Sonnenburg, some of them on the last train from there, which gave up at the trek-jammed junction with the chaussee at the Kietzerbusch Halt. The troops had already been on their way back when the car was sent off to find them after the battalion commander had sought vainly for four days for weapons for his men. In a last call on the morning of 30 January he was informed by a telephone operator that the staff had already left and would not be coming back, whereupon he had given the order to withdraw. Even the fortress was at first unprepared to arm these unexpected reinforcements, but gave them leave until the next morning. So for just one night they would enjoy the illusion of having survived.[20]
Chapter Five
The Siege Begins
Küstrin now adjusted into a state of siege. Even though the Soviet forces confronting the garrison were still relatively weak, the garrison was in no position to assess this. However, before examining the siege at this stage in some detail, it is necessary to review some of the outside factors governing the conduct of operations.
From 2 to 8 February Stalin and General Antonov, the Soviet Chief of the General Staff, were totally tied up with the Yalta Conference, leaving a yawning gap in the control of the forces entering Germany. Stalin had effectively demoted Marshal Zhukov from being the commander of a group of Fronts to being the commander of a single Front when he assumed command of the 1st Byelorussian Front on 16 November 1944. Stalin’s assumption that with fewer Fronts in operation he would be able to effectively coordinate their activities himself had not taken into account this distraction. In addition, Stalin refused to fly, thus adding at least two days’ travelling time by rail to his absence from the Kremlin.
As Professor John Erickson wrote:
A certain confusion began to prevail both within the Front commands and at the centre. There were unmistakable signs that the Stavka [the supreme high command], was no longer entirely abreast of the pace and extent of the Soviet advance: Koniev’s 1st Ukrainian Front had speedily outstripped its Stavka directives, while Zhukov’s Front was almost five days ahead of schedule when it reached the Kutno–Lodz line, yet no great thought seems to have been given to re-examining rates of advance and possible objectives. As they outran the Stavka directives, so also the Soviet armies overreached themselves in terms of supplies of food and ammunition; in the onward armoured rush, Soviet tank crews would fill up from one or two vehicles, leave them stranded and press on with the remainder of the battalion or company, but this could not solve the problem of ammunition. At the same time Marshal Zhukov was looking with growing anxiety at his northern flank–and yet again at his southern flank, where he depended upon Marshal Koniev.
On 31 January he sent an urgent signal to Stalin stressing that the frontage of the 1st Byelorussian Front had now reached 500 kilometres, that Rokossovsky’s left flank was lagging appreciably behind the right flank of the 1st Byelorussian Front–Rokossovsky must push his 70th Army forward–and Marshal Koniev should gain the Oder line as soon as possible. Marshal Zhukov received no reply to this urgent signal, and thus was faced with the dilemma of buttressing his outstretched right flank and at the same time concentrating all his armies for the advance on Berlin.[1]
It is no good looking in Zhukov’s memoirs for an informative account of the East Pomeranian Operation, for he barely mentions it. It seems that this was merely an annoying distraction from his main aim, the taking of Berlin, and therefore this episode is almost entirely covered in his memoirs by a counterattack against Chuikov’s allegations that the city could have been taken earlier. He summarised:
Initially, the task of routing the enemy in East Pomerania was supposed to be the sole responsibility of the forces of the 2nd Byelorussian Front. However, their strength proved to be totally insufficient. The offensive of that Front, begun on the 10th February, proceeded very slowly; its troops covered only 50 to 70 kilometres in ten days.
At that moment the enemy launched a counterattack south of Stargard and even succeeded in pressing our troops back, gaining some 12 kilometres southward.
19
Schrode, p. 82. These Ju-87G Stukas were equipped with 37mm cannon underslung from the wings outboard of the fixed undercarriage.