Then we had to pick up the squashed remains out of the sand with bloody hands and put them in a shellhole.[6]
Willi Klär concluded his account of events he witnessed at Kummersdorf Gut:
On the morning of 30 April the inhabitants left the cellar of the old folks’ home and returned to their own homes, only to be met by an horrific scene. Corpses were lying all over the place, about 2,000 of them, men, women and children who had been killed in the woods, in the village and on the ranges.
On the morning of 1 May all the men remaining in the village were rounded up at the old folks’ home, whose hall was crammed with wounded German soldiers. All who could walk, whether soldiers or civilians, were led off as prisoners to Sperenberg, where the square between the chemist and the station bar was crowded with them all. They were then divided up into large groups and marched off under escort towards Rehagen, Mellensee, Zossen, Nächst Neuendorf and Glienick to Gross Schulzendorf, which they reached at about midnight. The heavy firing in the battle for Berlin could be seen well from here.
The prisoners were then put in a camp behind barbed wire, a former German Army training camp on the road to Jühnsdorf, and everyone was given a small packet of crispbread.
Next morning, 2 May, most of the civilians were allowed to return home after being interrogated. It was a long march on foot from the Kummersdorf Ranges to Gross Schulzendorf and back, about 52 kilometres, and both days without food.
On 4 May the inhabitants of the village and ranges began digging mass and individual graves to get the dead under the earth for fear of an epidemic. The barracks continued to serve as a hospital for several months.[7]
The Soviet commanders responsible for arranging the burial of the war dead varied in practice regarding the treatment of the identity discs and paybooks of the German dead. In most cases it was forbidden to record the names of the dead and their effects had to be destroyed. Witnesses reported that in some instances only members of the Army, Navy or Air Force were given a proper grave, members of the Waffen-SS and even the Volkssturm being set aside and buried without markers. What happened to the dead policemen, who had fought in their distinctive green uniforms, is not known. In Halbe itself the identity of only about 300 of the dead could be established.
The Soviets saw to their own dead, with few exceptions avoiding the use of German cemeteries on ideological grounds. Instead they usually established their own cemeteries in the centre of villages or other prominent sites. The Soviet cemetery on Reichsstrasse 96 on the northern outskirts of Baruth was officially established on 7 November 1947 and contains some 1,300 of their dead in 22 mass graves, mainly men from 3rd Guards Tank Army, but these are by no means all the Soviet troops who died in the area.
The vast war cemetery at Halbe, the Waldfriedhof, or Woodland Cemetery, as it is discreetly known, came about as a result of the efforts of Pastor Ernst Teichmann and his wife. Upon his return from the war, during which he had been a padre with the Wehrmacht, Pastor Teichmann took over a parish in the Harz Mountains, where he started concerning himself with the graves of the war dead to be found there. He first heard about Halbe in 1947 and went to see for himself. At about the same time Berlin’s Bishop Dibelius managed to establish an Evangelical Church commission for the care of war graves in both halves of the city. Although the Volkssbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge (German War Graves Commission) was anxious to assist, it had no authority in East Germany, and could only provide support from behind the scenes. Then, on 29 July 1948, a war graves commission was established for the state of Brandenburg when the Soviet Military Administration passed the responsibility for this matter to the civilian authorities, ordering all identifications to be passed on to the German Red Cross in West Berlin for registration.
Pastor Teichmann applied and was accepted for the post of parish priest at Halbe in 1951 and eventually the Waldfriedhof was laid out in accordance with his recommendations. Meanwhile, despite the indifference and even hostility of the East German authorities, Teichmann and his wife, with the help of some members of the community, applied themselves assiduously to the task of identifying and reinterring the war dead from the area with reverence and care. He continued this work until his death in 1983. By the end of 1958 the official record showed 19,178 reinterred, and by the end of 1989 this had risen to 20,222 bodies, of which some 8,000 had been identified.
Not all the war dead came from the immediate vicinity, for East German expansion of open-cast coal mining in the Lausitz area resulted in most of the war dead from that area being transferred to Halbe. Remains are still being discovered at a rate of about 200 per year to add to the cemetery’s total. It also contains the remains of some 4,500 prisoners who died in the Soviet ‘Special Camp No. 5’ in Ketschendorf, near Fürstenwalde, during the period 1945–7. The Waldfriedhof is the largest military cemetery on German soil.[8]
The search for missing persons became a major task in post-war Germany, and few enquirers would be fortunate enough to receive such detailed information regarding the fate of a missing daughter, as was given in this letter written by a soldier four months later:
Meanwhile the Russians had surrounded the pocket that we wanted to escape from and we no longer had the slightest peace. We reached the Hammer–Halbe area in stages. I took your daughter, along with six other refugees, to just short of Hammer, where she could wait out the development of the overall situation herself. She returned that night to the place where we were parked, because Hammer was under fire and the cellars there were all full. Towards morning on 28 April we came under heavy mortar fire so withdrew further into the woods. With dawn all hell broke out from all sides. The first barrage went over us as we lay in a slit trench. At about 0840 hours there was another barrage during which a bomb from a heavy mortar hit a tree behind our trench and we were unlucky enough to have all the splinters shower down directly on our trench. I felt a piercing pain in my left shoulder and said to your daughter: ‘I’ve had it.’ Then I noticed that Traudel had started crying, and so had your daughter.
At first it looked like the effects of shock, until your daughter started groaning. The whole thing only lasted seconds. When I heard your daughter’s breathing, I realised what was wrong. Three large splinters had pierced her back and the air was coming out of her wounds. Comrades sitting in a hole nearby immediately took Traudel to the dressing station that was close by, as she had a small wound in her leg, while I attended to your daughter as far as my wound would let me. As she had lost consciousness immediately after being wounded, I could not communicate with her. Death followed very quickly, as the medical officer who had been summoned confirmed. We then buried your daughter in the trench in which she had so quickly met her fate.
I then went to the main dressing station to look for Traudel and get my wound dressed. I found Traudel there and took her with me to find transport. However, the artillery and mortar fire was so heavy that no transport was possible and we had to spend the whole day sitting in a foxhole. Then, at about 1900 hours that evening, we were taken to the Hammer forestry office. At the same time the Russians attacked us from the rear and we had no choice but to break out to the front.