We reached the Borkwalde settlement unscathed. Light was coming from a cellar window. We went down to the cellar, where a few men and women were sitting. The Russians had passed through here a few days before heading north for Potsdam, but there had been German troops in the area for several days. They had evacuated several hundred wounded and nurses from the Beelitz sanatorium, but had gone again. No Russians had been seen west of the autobahn in the last few days.
Now we were sure – we had got through.[11]
The last of the armoured vehicles kept to the Rieben–Schönefeld road, where several Soviet anti-tank barriers were overcome. But then the leading armour was struck again, as SS-Lieutenant Bärmann remembered:
We saw about ten T-34s near Schönefeld. A Königstiger stood about 400 metres in front of Schönefeld, taking the anti-tank barrier and Russian tanks under fire, and only pulling back when it ran out of ammunition. We couldn’t get through on the Beelitz road, so turned off left on a track and drove across open country. Despite enemy fire, we reached a wooded hill on which there was a radio transmitter mast, about 400 metres south of Schönefeld, where we stopped to reorientate ourselves.[12]
Helmuth Jurisch, who was also in this area, reported:
From the radio station near Schönefeld a track led through a wood to the village of Elsholz about two kilometres away. Along this track towards Elsholz were moving soldiers like myself who had fought their way from Halbe. Then in the wood in front of Elsholz I was taken aboard another of our tanks as radio-operator. As we came out of the wood the village lay suddenly in front of us, the houses hidden behind trees, the church back a bit on the right, and green fields in front. Everything was quiet at first, but soon an enemy machine gun opened up rather ineffectively from the church tower on the attacking soldiers, who, according to a witness, were able to take the machine gunners in the tower.
Fortunately the Russians had no anti-tank weapons in the village, so our tank was able to reach the village intact. Ivan took to flight and crept away. After a short stop to ensure all was in order, we rolled on into the village. We then came to the Nieplitz swamp, in which our last four Panthers became stuck fast. This swamp lies west of Elsholz behind Route 2. From here a track went past the railway station, through a wood and over fields to cross some meadows short of the Nieplitz stream. There in the meadows right of the track lay the graveyard of the last remains of our tanks, the four Panthers of 1st Battalion, Panzer Regiment Brandenburg, which had fought since 4 February 1945 with Panzergrenadier Division Kurmark. We bailed out for the last time and had to watch as our four Panthers, virtually out of fuel and ammunition, literally sank into the swamp. We twenty tankmen then marched towards Beelitz, crossed the Nieplitz stream by the nearest bridge, made our way across streams and ditches and finally reached Route 246 south-west of Beelitz, where troops of the Wenck Army were moving towards Brück. After several days we reached Fischbeck on the Elbe and crossed the collapsed Elbe bridge into American captivity near Tangermünde.[13]
Totally exhausted, an estimated 30,000 people, including 5,000 civilians, reached General Wenck’s lines, leaving behind 13,000 prisoners and over 5,000 killed.[14] Busse later suggested that some 40,000 men and several thousand refugees reached Wenck’s lines. Other figures are lower. Koniev says that about 30,000 of the 200,000 who broke out of the Halbe pocket reached the Beelitz area, but were then set upon again by his forces and that at the most only 3–4,000 could have got through to 12th Army. In any case, whatever the numbers, for those who had achieved their goal, it had been a considerable physical and mental feat.[15]
On 1 May Marshal Zhukov’s 33rd Army relieved 13th Army as Koniev’s 1st Ukrainian Front redeployed for ‘Operation Prague’. By this stage the reduction of the remaining breakthrough groups had become a secondary task and was completed with varying degrees of success.
FOURTEEN
Retreat to the Elbe
As soon as General Reymann’s troops and the exhausted remains of 9th Army were safely behind XX Corps’ lines, General Wenck gave the order for the withdrawal to the Elbe to begin on the night of 1/2 May. The withdrawal was conducted without pause day and night, the screening divisions taking care to conceal their movement and avoid any conflict that would hamper their progress, the rearguards only fighting delaying actions when necessary. As the artillery pieces ran out of ammunition, they were blown up and abandoned. Tanks, APCs and armoured cars covered the flanks.
At first the Soviets did not pursue too strongly. This was probably due to the after-effects of their May Day celebrations and by the need to re-deploy while 1st Byelorussian Front took over the 1st Ukrainian Front’s responsibilities to release Koniev’s men for the attack on Prague.[1]
The survivors of 9th Army were in no fit state to continue the struggle. Some were fortunate enough to get rides on a shuttle service of trucks and trains to the Elbe organized by 12th Army, but many had to make their own way, as Helmut Jurisch described:
When Bert Fink and I were dropped off by truck in Ziesar, word was going round that the remains of 9th Army were pushing through to the Elbe and going into American captivity.
We both found somewhere to spend the night in Halbe, clean ourselves up and sleep, as we had not done for so long, in soft feather beds. I even had a bit of luck, as the pretty young woman of the house took a fancy to me.
We set off again next morning, and right after Ziesar we stumbled on a paddock with horses belonging to an abandoned farm, and a friendly nag allowed itself to be caught. Inside the farm buildings we found some harness and a rubber-tyred carriage. Although neither of us had any experience with horses, we managed to get the harness on the lovely animal and hitch him to the carriage. Thus we two tankies reverted to being cavalrymen. The drop in capacity from a tank to a one-horsepower wagon that had to take us from the advancing Russians to Fischbeck/Tangermünde went without difficulty. I took over the driving of our one-horsepower wagon, which soon filled with soldiers as we rolled along through the peaceful landscape towards our survival goal. Several kilometres from Genthin we were stopped by a Waffen-SS soldier, with an automatic rifle at the aim, coming out of a wood. This made us uneasy, but he only wanted to secure a place on our wagon for his comrade, who was very ill and exhausted, and for us to take him on to the field hospital in Genthin. The comrades squeezed up together and the SS soldier was given a proper seat, but our youngest comrade, barely 16 years old, had to ride on the step. We soon reached Genthin, found the hospital and something to eat for ourselves and the horse, and moved on again.
Meanwhile I had got used to driving our one-horsepower wagon, so that the drive went without a hitch. That evening we sought accommodation in a village along our route.
Next day I reached Fischbeck in good form with my crew, and turned the horse loose in the green Elbe meadows. We found temporary accommodation in a barn and spied out the land. We found all that we needed for survival in vehicles abandoned in the Elbe meadows: food, underwear, bits of uniform, and also equipment. Only a few soldiers had come across this ‘army supply depot’ so far, as most were streaming directly to the crossing place, where a mass of soldiers were crammed together. We looked for everything that a soldier going on a journey needed; haversack, blankets, tent-half, underwear, long-life sausage, and so on.
13
Jurisch to the author. Although he gives the date of this incident as 30 April, it seems most likely to have occurred on 1 May. In a subsequent discussion with the author, Jurisch stated that the driving of the tanks into a swamp just north of Salzbrunn was deliberate.
15
Busse, ‘Die letzte Schlacht der 9. Armee’, p. 168, describes the break-out as having taken place on the night of 26/27 April and the union with 12th Army on the morning of the 29th, but this is in conflict with Wenck’s chronology and that of other witnesses, and allowance should be made for the fact that Busse’s article was apparently written in captivity some ten years after the event; Wenck, ‘Berlin war nicht mehr zu retten’, pp. 68–9. Koniev,