The autobahn ran down the centre, a broad asphalted road that had already been cleared for traffic. Along a stretch of 200 metres it was pocked with small and large craters that the military vehicles driving to Berlin were having to zigzag round.
The cutting continued on the left-hand side, and part of the German column that had already crossed the autobahn was destroyed here. Again, as far as the eye could see, there was a mess of burnt-out, smashed, overturned vehicles. Again dead and wounded. As an officer hastily informed me, the whole of this vast column had come under fire from several regiments of heavy artillery and a few regiments of Katyushas that had previously been concentrated in the vicinity and had fired on the cutting on the assumption that the Germans would try to break through here.
We left this scene of horror and after a few kilometres saw a convoy of five or six ambulances coming towards us. Apparently someone had summoned reinforcements from our medical battalions but, considering the scale of the slaughter, these five or six vehicles would be no more than a drop in the ocean.[1]
This was the situation that faced the victors in May 1945. Apart from evacuating prisoners and tending to the vast numbers of wounded, the dead had to be buried as soon as possible, a gruesome task that was passed on to the local population, consequently mainly to women and teenagers, to which were added teams of former Nazi officials and prisoners of war.
Elisabeth Schulz gave her account regarding the fate of the wounded:
I was then nineteen years old and working as an auxiliary nurse in Schloss Baruth. At about 0900 hours on 20 April 1945 we were told that it was everyone for themselves. The wounded could not be taken along with us. We were three nurses, two medical orderlies and two Hiwis [Russian volunteers]. We decided to stay until all the wounded were gone. Some left on wagons with the nurses and doctors.
With part of the Schloss already on fire, we put the last eighteen severely wounded on a haycart. They were only wearing shirts, as the quartermasters had shut up shop and made off. What the poor boys had to suffer was indescribable, but there were no complaints. They were grateful for being saved, as they thought. The Hiwis had found two horses and we set off across the Schloss park. By the time we reached the meadows, the Russian tanks had already passed us, and there was firing from all sides. We quickly laid the wounded down on the grass and took cover. Everything then happened very quickly. We watched the Russians charge across the meadows and shoot medical orderlies, nurses and wounded. I have to thank my fellow nurse, Hedwig Steicke, for saving my life. She ran back with me across the park.
We lay there all night long and then joined the refugees from Baruth next morning, running for our lives across the meadows and being shot at by low-flying aircraft. We came to Radeland, where white flags already hung from the windows, and were most kindly taken in by the Hillebrands family, fed and clothed. Then the first Russians arrived and fighting started in the woods. We were hidden as well as possible in the hayloft. We two nurses then tended the German wounded that the local people brought to us in an abandoned farmhouse, laying them on straw, cutting off their blood-crusted uniforms, destroying the Waffen-SS uniforms, washing the wounded and trying to tend to them without medicine or bandages. Everything we could find was used. The people from the village helped with food, whatever they could find, for the hunger was very great. Even a doctor appeared from somewhere. We amputated with a handsaw. There was a terrible stench. All the amputees and the dead were put in a barn. There were 145 men with head or stomach wounds and they all died. Soldiers even died of tetanus from small wounds. We could only comfort them as they died. The youngest was only just sixteen years old. He died from a shot in the kidneys – very slowly. About 100 lightly wounded we treated as walking cases and sent them on. We worked day and night, and only slept in hiding. Whenever Soviet controls came, we would literally hold out the excrement buckets under their noses so that they would give up.
We did not record the names of the dead, as we had nothing to write with, and also no time. Apart from that, none of us believed that we would get back home alive. One of our doctors collected their identity discs. Hopefully, they reached the right place.
About mid-May Soviet officers made it clear to us that everyone that was half fit to work, or would soon be fit to work, would be deported to the Soviet Union. Several of us quickly got away, including myself. I only wish that some of them survived, so that our help had not been in vain.[2]
Expediency resulted in many of the dead being buried without any record of name or location being made, the bodies being dragged to and tipped into the nearest trenches and shellholes.
Herr G. Fonrobert, an inhabitant of Halbe, where some 4,000–5,000 had been killed,[3] wrote:
After the surrender was finally achieved on 1 May, we inhabitants of the village were immediately put to burying the dead, and for weeks there was nothing else to think about, as thousands of bodies had to be buried, mainly in quickly-dug makeshift mass graves. And, as a result of the warm spring sunshine, it was necessary to do it quickly. Afterwards there were many months of superficial clearing up of the roads and woods of the war materiel of all kinds lying around, including shot-up army vehicles, guns and tanks that had to be towed away. But everywhere in the woods around for an even longer time there was a smell of decay and fire that persisted for months.[4]
Erwin Hillebrands, then twelve years old, related:
I remember 600–700 dead being buried in three layers in a U-shaped grave at the entrance to Radeland, civilians, soldiers and even children. They were carried out together from the fields and woods around, only a few from the village itself. This quick burial was carried out on the instructions of the Soviet commandant responsible. An epidemic had to be avoided. Sometimes the corpses fell apart or had been eaten by foxes. It was a nauseating task. They pushed the bodies with poles into a suitable or shallow hollow, or simply covered them with sand. If Soviet soldiers were present, it was strongly forbidden to remove the identity discs; the dead were to remain anonymous. The exhumation of this mass grave took place at night in about 1951.[5]
Hilde Neufert, who was twenty-two at the time, vividly recalled the horrors of this task:
When the fighting was over in Märkisch Buchholz, the Russians immediately ordered the men and women, the boys and girls too, to bury the dead, although ‘bury’ was hardly the right word for it.
There was a mobile workshop in our yard, and the Russians were recovering all kinds of vehicles from the woods. On one occasion there was a Wehrmacht ambulance full of corpses. We had to unload them, all of whom, apart from their wounds, had had a bullet in the back of the neck. We had to throw their bodies mostly into bomb craters, pits and trenches under the eyes of the guards, and then cover them over.
There was a big bomb crater near our house. Once it had been filled to the top, Christmas decorations that an officer had found in our house, balls and ribbons, were strewn over it and trampled in.
I can still recall today when we removed the dead from the woods outside the village and laid them down in a row on the roadside to await transport; it was quite a long row. Suddenly a tank appeared, which changed course from the middle of the road and rolled back and forth several times over the row of corpses. But that was not enough. Finally the tank swivelled around on the remains, mashing them into the sand, and the commander, an officer, shouted at us as we looked on in horror: ‘Gittler kapuut! Deitschland kapuut! Wehrmacht kapuut! Soldat kapuut! Nix mehr da! Ha-ha-ha!’