Wenck’s attack had thus isolated 6th Guards Mechanized Corps from the rest of 4th Guards Tank Army at a time when this corps was extended over a distance of some 28 kilometres. The 5th Guards Mechanized Corps and 13th Army were having to form a double front, expecting Busse’s 9th Army to try and break out to the west at any moment from behind them, while the rest of 4th Guards Tank Army was still heavily engaged in the containment of the Potsdam and Wannsee ‘islands’.[17]
Next morning the Army Group’s situation report on the events of the 27th to the OKH contained the following:
Breakthrough attempt failed. Armoured spearheads with the most valuable elements have broken out to the west contrary to specific orders, or been destroyed. Other attacking groups have been stopped or in part thrown back with considerable loss. The physical and mental condition of officers and men, as well as the ammunition and fuel situation, allows neither a renewal of the planned break-out attack nor long holding out. Especially hard is the shattering misery of the civilian population concentrated in the cauldron. Only through the measures taken by all generals has it been possible to keep the troops going until now.[18]
By evening the remains of 9th Army had withdrawn back into the core of the remaining pocket, where the forests of Halbe and Märkisch Buchholz formed the assembly areas, resembling vast military encampments. Tanks and SPGs were to be used to provide the decisive thrust at the head of the breakthrough next morning. This time the attack would be along the line Halbe–Kummersdorf Gut. What nobody knew was that this led directly into the Soviets’ best prepared defences in depth.
Conditions for the remaining inhabitants of Halbe were described in various accounts. One of these came from Ingrid Feilsch, who was then 15 years old:
Hans, my eldest brother, was watching a wounded man being bandaged in the yard when the first shell hit the house. He was killed instantly. A French prisoner of war, who was living with us, brought him down into the cellar.
Next day another shell struck, killing my youngest brother, the three-year-old, in his cot, as well as a playmate and his grandmother. My mother lost both her feet. That was the most terrible thing. We looked for a medical orderly for hours, but where was the help? Mother cried until the next day, then she was dead. My five-year-old brother Ernst and myself were now alone. Father came back late from the war.[19]
Herr G. Fonrobert also described his experiences:
I myself experienced the horrific inferno of the bloody encirclement battle as a war-wounded civilian in a house in the Halbe settlement that changed hands three times in bitter, close-quarter fighting. The experience remains vividly in front of my eyes even today.
After the railway tracks at Halbe had been blown up by the engineers, there was a stream of hurrying people flowing through the streets of Halbe all day long. A chaotic confusion of wounded soldiers on different kinds of military vehicles, as well as refugee groups of mainly women and children, all seeking to escape from the Russians as a result of Goebbels’ lying propaganda.
Meanwhile our village had been occupied by SS and military police units, and soon afterwards we clearly heard the sounds of artillery and infantry fire. The civilians took shelter in their cellars.
And then at dawn on 25 April began the fearful slaughter of the Halbe pocket that was to last six days and six nights.
The air shuddered with the din of heavy weapons of all sizes, of tank battles, the roar of mortars, rockets and the rattle of machine guns, interrupted at times by strafing from Soviet ground-attack aircraft. There were seven of us in the cellar of our house, including a nine-year-old child, finally sitting quite apathetic and numbed by the ear-deafening explosions – sleep was out of the question – pressed close to the cellar walls and waiting for the end with horror after the neighbouring house had been torn in half by a shell and our own house had suffered considerable damage.
Following the bloody rounds of man against man around our house, in which there were dead and wounded, the soldiers of the Red Army finally occupied it and set up a command post in the living room upstairs and in the cellar, showing themselves to be very humane, giving us cigarettes and chocolate.
Later, eight male inhabitants of the settlement, including myself, were tasked by the Soviet military with seeing to the severely injured lying on the sports ground, but soon had to withdraw again and take cover, despite our white armbands, when we were fired on recklessly by the SS unit lying on either side of the sports ground and started taking casualties as civilians in the auxiliary medical service!
In seeking cover, we saw a frightful scene at a crossroads at the edge of the village. An anti-tank barrier had been attacked shortly before, and piles of bodies lay there, some in a cramped position and squashed by the tanks that had rolled over them, wounded crying out for help, dying horses trying to struggle up again, puddles of blood everywhere, burning and destroyed houses, collapsing ruins, abandoned guns and scattered equipment – a picture of horror and devastation, truly a face of war that could not be worse depicted.[20]
TEN
The Eye of the Needle
28 APRIL 1945
According to Soviet sources, the fighting on 28 April began with an attack along a five-kilometre front by a divisional-sized battlegroup supported by 20 tanks. This occurred in the Löpten–Teurow sector astride Halbe on the inter-front boundary between 40th Rifle Corps of 3rd Army and 21st Rifle Corps of 3rd Guards Army. The battle raged for hours, but ferocious close-quarter fighting and heavy covering fire failed to secure a decisive breach for the Germans. There was no question of a breakthrough to the autobahn. The German forces, commanded by SS-General Kleinheisterkamp, came from the remains of 712th Infantry Division of XI SS Panzer Corps, 286th Infantry Division of V SS Mountain Corps, and 275th and 342nd Infantry and 35th SS Police Divisions of V Corps, plus a number of independent units. Unfortunately for Kleinheisterkamp’s plan, 32nd SS Division had come under increased Soviet pressure and had been unable to disengage from the perimeter to reinforce the breach as had been intended. Consequently, the units on the northern perimeter were also forced to hold on. It is possible that some small groups managed to break out of the encirclement, but the majority were thrown back with heavy losses.[1]
Corporal Harry Zvi Glaser, a Lithuanian-born Jew, had been forced out of his country by the German invasion of 1941 and enlisted in the Red Army as soon as he was old enough in 1944. Now leading a rifle section in 2nd Battalion of 438th Rifle Regiment, 129th Orel Rifle Division of 3rd Army, he wrote of his experience at Halbe:
On 28 April our unit was ordered to pull out of Berlin and make a forced march overnight down the 35 kilometres of autobahn to Halbe. At dawn I deployed my section on the eastern edge of the village overlooking a vast neglected pasture, and a Maxim machine gun was brought up to reinforce us, which I placed on our right flank. After I had briefed my men, I went off to check the farmhouse behind us. I found some frightened civilians in the cellar and told them in German: ‘Stay indoors, don’t leave the house under any circumstances until you get fresh instructions!’
‘Ja, jawohl, Herr Offizier!’ came the reply. I spotted some cans of meat on a shelf. ‘Please take them!’ said an old man, the only male in the family, so I took two cans to feed my hungry men and went back to the trenches, having to step over the bodies of several dead German soldiers.
18
Lakowski/Stich,