Meanwhile Koniev’s tank armies, backed by three-quarters of Colonel-General S. A. Krasovsky’s 2nd Air Army’s aircraft, continued to make steady progress northward, although not fast enough to satisfy Koniev who was still hoping to get into Berlin ahead of Zhukov. Apart from a few local Volkssturm units, there were no troops around to oppose the Soviets in this area and yet Colonel-General P.S. Rybalko’s 3rd Guards Tank Army, concerned about the German forces on its right flank, made only about thirty kilometres on the 19th, in comparison with the fifty kilometres made by Colonel-General D.D. Lelyushenko’s 4th Guards Tank Army. Koniev sent Colonel-General N.P. Pukhov’s 13th Army to follow them up and secure their flanks and lines of communication.[8]
A member of the 4th Guards Tank Army commented:
We forced the Neisse and Spree, reached Spremberg, Calau and Dahme. Everywhere we came across German refugees, but mostly prisoners of war and forced labourers from many countries, all asking for something to eat. We gave them what food we had.[9]
This advance by Koniev’s forces had isolated V Corps from the remainder of 4th Panzer Army, so that on the evening of 19 April it was transferred to General Busse’s command. Busse immediately ordered it to leave only a light screen in its positions along the Neisse and to cover his rear with a line of defence from north of Lübben to Halbe. He also took its 21st Panzer Division under his direct command, sending it to establish a line of defence along the chain of lakes between Teupitz and Königs Wusterhausen. However, this division had been seriously fragmented in the previous fighting, and the headquarters element under Lieutenant-General Werner Marcks brought little with it apart from Major Brand’s 21st Armoured Reconnaissance Battalion, Artillery Regiment Tannenberger and some elements of the 192nd Panzergrenadier Regiment. Battlegroup von Luck, consisting of Colonel von Luck’s 125th Panzergrenadier Regiment and the remaining Panthers of the 22nd Panzer Regiment, was still engaged in the southern part of V Corps’ area.[10]
Hitler’s 56th birthday, 20 April 1945, was the day he belatedly decided to make Army Group Weichsel responsible for the defence of the capital. Heinrici immediately assigned the task to 9th Army, but General Busse argued the point and the order was rescinded, the Berlin Defence Area remaining directly under Army Group Headquarters. With the remains of 9th Army coiling back on themselves in the south, the only resource now available was LVI Panzer Corps, already fully stretched and in imminent danger of losing contact with the formations on either side. In Heinrici’s opinion, Hitler’s instructions for 9th Army to remain on the Oder had condemned it to extinction and he therefore decided to concentrate upon saving 3rd Panzer Army north of Berlin from a similar fate, in essence leaving the problem of Berlin to LVI Panzer Corps.[11]
As a means of compensating for the depletion of the Berlin garrison, the Friedrich Ludwig Jahn Infantry Division of Reichsarbeitsdienst (RAD – Labour Service) personnel from General Walter Wenck’s 12th Army was reassigned to the Berlin Defence Area but no one in Berlin seemed to know where the division was, or what it consisted of, and such was the state of communications that despatch riders had to be sent out to find it. Eventually the divisional headquarters was traced to a village north of Trebbin and Lieutenant-General Helmuth Reymann, commander of the Berlin Defence Area, set out to visit it.[12]
Koniev’s forces were now approaching rapidly from the south against negligible opposition.[13] A column of 360 tanks and 700 other vehicles was reported moving north up the autobahn past Lübben.[14] Colonel-General Rybalko remained very concerned about his 3rd Guards Tank Army’s vulnerability to flank attack, and kept dropping off road-blocks to seal off the Spreewald pocket, much to the annoyance of Koniev, who sent him the following signaclass="underline"
Comrade Rybalko, you are moving like a snail. One brigade is fighting, the rest of the army standing still. I order you to cross the Baruth–Luckenwalde line through the swamps along several routes and deployed in battle order. Report fulfilment. Koniev.[15]
With Koniev’s exhortations urging it on, 3rd Guards Tank Army succeeded in covering sixty kilometres on 20 April, taking Baruth during the course of the afternoon and almost reaching Zossen before disaster struck.[16] The leading brigade of 6th Guards Tank Corps ran out of fuel and was then destroyed piecemeal by Panzerfausts.[17]
This occurred close to the Maybach bunker complex, where the bulk of the OKW and OKH staff had anxiously been awaiting permission to evacuate all day. The camp guard company, together with six to eight tanks from the nearby Wünsdorf training establishment, had been sent to block the crossroads at Luckau. By 0600 hours that morning, however, they were already reporting being bypassed by Soviet armour, and by nightfall the twenty survivors of the 250-strong unit were back in Zossen, apparently unaware of the cause of the delay in the Soviet advance. This, presumably, had been due to the intervention of local Volkssturm or Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth) units.[18]
However, Koniev claimed that the Germans had pitted what he described as a tank training battalion, a brigade of assault guns, three labour and two construction regiments, two flying schools and units of the Friedrich Ludwig Jahn Division against his advance on Berlin.[19] The defence in this area is presumed to have been a battlegroup commanded by a Colonel Oertel, to which the 1st Grenadier Regiment of the Friedrich Ludwig Jahn Division had been sent by truck after the collapse on the Oder.[20] The tank training battalion he mentions was presumably an ad hoc unit raised by the tank school at Wünsdorf, while the brigade of assault guns would have been a battalion of SPGs, a deliberate misnomer used by the Germans at this stage of the war.
Permission was then received from the Führerbunker for the OKW and OKH staff to evacuate, but the staff packed up in such haste that there was no time to destroy any of the documents and equipment left behind, and the Soviets were able to take over these items intact next day. The convoy set off for Wannsee, a south-western suburb of Berlin, at about 1500 hours and immediately came under air attack, losing two of its vehicles. From Wannsee the OKW element was redirected to Krampnitz, north of Potsdam, and the OKH to the Luftwaffe Academy at Gatow. General Krebs moved permanently into the Führerbunker with General Wilhelm Burgdorf, Hitler’s chief adjutant and head of the Army Personnel Office.[21]
10
Von Luck,
11
Gosztony,
12
Kuby,
Six months’ service with the Reichsarbeitsdienst was a statutory preliminary to military service and included generous amounts of drill, marching and discipline in its programme. Towards the end of the war, RAD units were inevitably armed and incorporated into the military.
13
Novikov, ‘The Air Forces in the Berlin Operation’, p. 93. ‘We did not know that the enemy had so few troops to defend this boundary and expected strong opposition.’
17
Some 40 years later at Spandau Allied Prison the author discussed this episode with Soviet Army officers, who regarded this incident as common knowledge.
18
Tieke,
21
Gosztony,