Late in the afternoon we found ourselves in the wood north-east of Märkisch Buchholz again. Soldiers were camping everywhere and standing around vehicles, including quite a lot of trucks, staff cars and command vehicles. The most senior bigwigs collected around them with their red stripes and gold on their collar patches and caps. These gentlemen were studying maps and conferring, while NCOs were searching among the pines for members of Waffen-SS units. We were really glad not to have been forgotten. The 30. Januar Security Company had come together again and was apparently complete.
Night descended and movement was discernible in the wood around us, but we were not allowed to ride on the tanks. We waited in hope, but had to return to the ranks. The places on the tanks were to be taken by the gentlemen of the staff. Some moonlight came through the pines revealing sandy tracks. The tanks rolled past us and apparently took another direction. The sound of their motors faded away.
We crossed a road and I read ‘Märkisch Buchholz’ and ‘Halbe’ ahead on a signpost. The wood on either side of the road was swarming with soldiers. In front of us Russian artillery fire was coming from the direction of Halbe. The enemy fire increased and shells of all calibres burst among the treetops, breaking tree trunks and ripping holes in them as splinters whistled through the air and branches showered down. That was quite some bombardment. We were expected. I jumped from cover to cover and dived behind pine trees with only one thought: ‘not me!’ In the bright flashes of the explosions I saw some silhouettes flitting about, but only a few. I came through all right myself and saw to left and right of me motionless, waiting soldiers. I wanted to get them to move along with us, but they wouldn’t move. They remained lying there under fire, waiting for others to open the way for them.
We came across some despondent wounded men and some dead ones. I reached the roadway just short of the village. The artillery fire was going over us, so now the mortars took us on as their target. Ducking down, we hastened towards the station, having to avoid or jump over corpses. On the left-hand side was a railwaymen’s hut. It had really been hailing down hard here! I had seldom seen such a mass of dead in a small area in all the war, and then only on the Russian side, but these were Germans. The wood was now getting less dense and I could see the hut more clearly. Men were pressed tightly together along its length like a swarm of bees to a post. What we saw there looking like frozen grains of salt turned out to be totally terrified soldiers. They thought that they were in dead ground, safe from enemy fire, but what a mistake that was. They just turned round when shouted at. This was only a few metres from the railway level crossing barriers, which stuck up into the grey skies. On the crossing was a carpet of corpses, grey-green corpses. I could see only German soldiers. I had to get away from here. But where to? I could see nothing but corpses, corpses in front of us, on and beyond the crossing. And whoever hesitated here would soon be lying among them.
At first I tried to avoid the dead, for there were some wounded among them, but the dead were lying on top of each other in the middle of the crossing, and one couldn’t make out where one was treading. I had to grit my teeth and get on. The storage sheds near the station were beginning to burn and I could read ‘Halbe’ on the station sign. I will never be able to forget this place. I had to get away. We hastened along the street, which opened out in the grey of the pinewood only a few metres away [the road to Teurow and Freidorf]. There was some cover in the roadside ditches and many soldiers gathered here. Some vehicles also appeared, driving in both directions. Confusion and uncertainty clearly reigned here.[33]
Second Lieutenant Kurt Schwarz, of the 1st Battalion of Panzer Regiment Brandenburg, came through Halbe that evening in a group of four Panthers. They turned south towards Teurow and then west again for the autobahn:
Suddenly I was whirled round in the turret by a hard blow, a hit by a mortar bomb. The gunner and loader bandaged me up in the turret. Shortly afterwards we were hit in the side of the engine space and our Panther burst into flames. I screamed: ‘Out!’ We found cover together in a hollow close to the burning tank. Suddenly there was a big explosion and the pressure blew the turret off the turret ring. We pressed ourselves down in the hollow, and the seven-metre long gun barrel hit the ground right in front of us.[34]
Second Lieutenant Ernst Habermann of the same unit was leading a group of tanks in his APC and witnessed the destruction of two of the German tanks as they approached the autobahn:
A ferocious fight broke out here. Lieutenant Petersen’s tank was shot up and he was killed. Our APC was rammed by a Königstiger when it reversed while engaged by an anti-tank gun, and we had to continue on foot behind our tanks. I was about to get on to a passing tank when it was hit and I was wounded in the thigh. After a second hit, only the wounded driver and the radio operator bailed out. We lay down under the shot-up Panther and were tending our wounds, when it suddenly burst into flames, and we had to move away. Near the autobahn we found six dead soldiers who had been shot in the back of the neck.[35]
Günter Führling and Heiner Lüdermann, two officer cadets with orders to report to their parent 303rd Infantry Division still in their pockets, decided to leave the rearguard on the banks of the Dahme and make their own break-out to the west that evening. After passing endless, jammed, stationary columns of transport through Märkisch Buchholz and the woods leading to Halbe they came to the town. Führling depicted the scene in Halbe:
The noise of battle grew louder as we approached the railway embankment, which had to be crossed even though it was being swept by machine-gun fire. We had the impression that the firing was coming from both sides, but especially from the south. We did not have to crawl over the embankment, we could creep over, as there were so many dead soldiers that they protected us like a wide and high bulletproof screen on either side. We could hear no signs of life coming from these bodies; they had been riddled with bullets.
The station was on our right. The road forked and we came across some notices indicating that the troops should turn down the road to Teurow and that the general had already gone down that way with a Tiger in the lead and broken through.
I can still recall the details of the break-out, but I was astonished that information like this could be passed on so quickly in such chaos, when the sounds of battle were deafening. Standing on this street in Halbe, I did not yet realise that the break-out had become hopeless. We imagined that the leaders would be up ahead. The troops in the street should not have been leaderless, going like sheep to the slaughter, but that was exactly what was happening. Obviously the signs pointing the way down Kirchstrasse had been put up by Seydlitz-Troops in German uniform. They had taken up a position that would not be fired on by the Russians, and the Germans were being directed straight on to the Russian machine guns. The Russians had occupied the church on the right-hand side of the street and were firing from the church tower.
Although it was dark, the images remain fixed in my memory – but not the ear-deafening noise. The street was several hundred metres long and had most of its buildings on the right-hand side. The left-hand side was full of dead that had been dragged aside to clear the street. In the darkness it seemed that only the right-hand side of the street was inhabited. Like on the railway embankment, there was a wall of several thousand dead along the street that had fallen within these few hundred yards. I saw nothing of the trampled and mangled bodies, but I could hear the whimpering, groaning and cries for help. But everyone was concerned only for themselves, looking out for Russian snipers in the windows of the buildings, or from where the most fire was coming. Tanks and supply trucks stood still on the street as the attack faltered.