Colonel Kropp, the town commandant, then decided to withdraw his units, starting with the battalion defending the station sector on the left wing, with the battalion on the right wing acting as a rearguard and withdrawing by echelons to the fortified Pommern Stellung line at Barwalde, 10km west of the town, where they would await the withdrawal of other German units to this new line of resistance.
Of this engagement, Lieutenant Auphan later reported:
As soon as the order was received, the battalion on the left retreated in disorder, while the battalion on the right, which was meant to act as the rearguard, did not even wait for the order and pulled out well before my battalion retired last into the town. The rally point was the command post of the German regiment, five kilometres from the town on the Bad Polzin road, where the German colonel was supposed to be expecting his units.
The German colonel had fled with his baggage, abandoning maps, papers and telephone. Soon afterwards the command post was hit by a volley of mortar bombs and bursts of machine-gun fire coming from the direction of the lake.
I therefore decided to follow the retreat to Bärwalde, but two sections sent ahead as scouts reported that the route was already cut by Russians occupying the first village. It was hardly possible to engage them, but the railway line appeared clear, so that was the route decided upon. Pursued by the enemy, the battalion passed through a barrage of missiles, splitting into two detachments, Fayard’s on a railway engine, and Auphan-Tardan’s, which continued on foot.
Both rejoined the Division at Körlin.
Lieutenant Tardan’s report on the same episode ran:
When the fighting stated at the barricade on the Tempelburg road, I left my command post and went forward. Half an hour later, when the fighting had died down, I went back to my command post and found only my liaison staff. The machine-gun section and the mortars that had been kept in reserve had disappeared in the direction of Bad Polzin. There was no one at all at Lieutenant Auphan’s command post!
I therefore went to the command post of the German colonel in charge of the defence of the town, where I learnt that the Flak and Tank-Hunting Companies had left their positions to retreat to Bad Polzin.
Not knowing exactly what had happened, and as the encirclement had been completed and the noise of fighting coming from the southwest and the west, and that the road to Bad Polzin was cut five kilometres from Neustettin, I went back to my men.
Being the last of the Division with 60 men of the 4th Company, the commander under whose orders it had been placed having retired, and Brigadier Puaud having said on the previous day that this was only a retarding action and not an outright defence, I ordered my men to leave their positions.
Between 1800 hours on 27 February and 1100 hours on 1 March, Lieutenant Auphan’s 4th Company of the 1st/58th Regiment had to march 63km to reach Bad Polzin, being obliged to make several detours to avoid the Russian vanguards. At Bad Polzin the 4th Company was fed and supplied with ammunition at the local command post and rested for 40 hours. Having been rejoined by Lieutenant Auphan, the company then left for Belgard at 0600 hours on 3 March, rejoining the Division at Körlin at 1600 hours that day.
Meanwhile, those elements of the Division that had left Neustettin directed by Captain de Perricot, the acting Chief-of-Staff, continued their retreat to Belgard via Bärwalde and Bad Polzin, a distance of 72km. On the way they discovered that the much-lauded fortified position known as the Pommern Stellung was, at least around Bärwalde, unmanned.
At about 1400 hours on 27 February they came under serious machine-gunning from enemy aircraft, but losses were minimal, despite the dropping of 10kg bombs, followed by a miscellany of missiles no doubt recovered from a Tsarist arsenal, that included boxes of glass grenades crammed with darts and incendiary devices. The Ruskoné section of Lieutenant Wagner’s 7th of the 58th, which was marching at the tail of the column, managed to shoot down one of the aircraft with an automatic rifle.
In the middle of the night of the 27th/28th an hour’s rest was taken in Bad Polzin in falling snow and a glacial wind. After marching for the rest of the night and having passed on the way several meagre armoured elements, towards 0600 hours the vanguard of the column reached an area several kilometres south of Belgard, where regrouping and reorganisation were to take place.
Various elements of the Charlemagne kept arriving all day on the 28th, including SS-Major-General Krukenberg, who had come from Elsenau via Flötenstein and Köslin.
It had originally been intended that the reorganisation of the Charlemagne would take place at Köslin, an important town on the edge of the Baltic, but this town was already being threatened by Marshal Rokossovsky’s tanks, which had been advancing along the axis Baldenburg–Bublitz–Köslin since the fighting at Hammerstein. Köslin was in fact taken by the Russians on the evening of 2 March, thus shutting off the immense pocket of Danzig-Gothenhafen held by the German 2nd Army. The Soviet tanks then turned off east along the Baltic coast via Stolp and Neustadt.
Marshal Zhukov had launched his attack to clear the western half of Pomerania on the morning of 1 March with elements of his 1st Byelorussian Front, taking the Germans by surprise as the 1st Guards Tank Army on his right flank headed straight for Kolberg on the Baltic Coast.
On 2 March, SS-Major-General Krukenberg tasked Major Emile Raybaud with forming a march regiment from the most dependable elements of the 57th and 58th Regiments, as the local situation was becoming more and more critical. This difficult task was achieved in 10 hours. The remainder were then formed into a Reserve Regiment under Captain de Bourmont, but the fighting value of this latter regiment was greatly reduced through the troops’ extreme state of fatigue.
At about 1000 hours, Brigadier Puaud, accompanied by his staff (Major de Vaugelas, Captain Renault and Lieutenant Delille) made a motor reconnaissance of the banks of the Persante, a little river flowing through the towns of Belgard and Körlin and on to the Baltic at Kolberg. The aim of the reconnaissance was to find the crossing points before deploying blocking units. That same evening the divisional headquarters were established in Schloss Kerstin, northeast of Körlin.
At about 1800 hours the Divisional Headquarters received the order to move immediately to the little town of Körlin to stop and hold the Russian advance, and specifically to protect the withdrawal to the port of Kolberg of the troops in Pomerania.
The move was undertaken at night in a certain amount of confusion, leading to abnormal delays in the deployment of the companies after their arrival at Körlin. The unexpected arrival from Greifenberg of the Division’s 500-strong Field Replacement Battalion led by Captain Michel Bisiau next day enabled the provision of a third company for each provisional battalion and brought their establishments up to 750 men each.
At dawn on 3 March the Charlemagne, now more than 4,000 strong, took up positions in the little town of Körlin and the surrounding villages in the worst of atmospheric conditions, an icy blizzard. The Division now came under Major-General Oskar Munzel’s corps, covering the sector Köslin–Belgard–Kolberg, with headquarters at Belgard.
During the move of the column through Belgard, General Krukenberg had briefed Major Raybaud that the Charlemagne was to adopt a defensive position along the Persante River facing east, presenting a barrier to the enemy on the main road from Köslin to Stettin. In fact Körlin formed a strong natural defensive position, being surrounded on three sides by the Persante and a tributary that restricted access to the town to a few bridges that could easily be defended.