At about midday on 24 March I received orders for our relief. We were to return to the tank field workshops, while our position would be taken over by another unit.
Once the relieving commander had been briefed on the details of the hand-over, I drove back to Division, where the Intelligence Officer (Ia) told me of two Russian radio transmissions that had been intercepted. In the first the commander of the sector opposite the orchard had been rebuked for not pressing home his attack. In the second the sector commander reported that he had counted eight dug-in Königstigers in the orchard, against which he could make no progress. This was too much of an honour for us for, firstly, we only had five tanks in that position, and secondly, we had absolutely no Königstigers with us, and we were certainly not dug-in! But we often got similarly nice confirmations of success from Ivan over the radio.
Zobel lost his 2nd Squadron to the Küstrin Garrison. On 16 April he had his two remaining squadrons deployed behind the Hauptgraben water obstacle east of Seelow, where his battalion claimed over 50 Soviet tanks destroyed that day for a loss of four; the four that he had sent forward to support the infantry being knocked out in error by the German anti-tank gun screen. Having been outflanked on his right he withdrew his battalion that night to replenish in the woods behind the Stein-Stellung. Again on the third day of battle the battalion claimed to have destroyed another 50 Soviet tanks caught in the flank advancing north of Trebnitz. The battalion then covered the retreat to Berlin, where it became involved in the defence. Zobel was promoted major on 20 April and then led the breakout to the west over the Charlotten Bridge into Spandau (see With Our Backs to Berlin) on the night of 1/2 May. When the last vehicles ran out of fuel, they abandoned them and continued on foot. Unable to swim, Zobel nevertheless got across two rivers, ending up naked on the west bank of the Elbe, where he persuaded a mayor to provide him with civilian clothing and a pass stating that he was ‘visiting his pregnant wife in the next village’. Armed with this, he traversed American-occupied territory until he found his wife working for the British in Braunschweig, where he joined her as an interpreter, never having been taken prisoner.
In due course he received an invitation to join a German team to help train the Egyptian Army, which he did until another letter arrived inviting him to help found the Bundeswehr. On his way home he learnt of the defeat of the Egyptian Army in the Six Days War with Israel, in which virtually all the armoured troops he had helped train had been wiped out.
Zobel subsequently became a full colonel and Inspector of Panzer Troops in the Bundeswehr and, after his retirement from active service, went on to edit a technical journal on armoured subjects.
SIX
The Defence of Seelow
KARL-HERMANN TAMS
I met Karl-Hermann Tams at the reunions of the 20th Panzergrenadier Division’s ‘Mook wie’ old comrades’ association held on the anniversary of the battle for the Seelow Heights, which were held at the Seelow Museum each year after the reunification of Germany made such events possible. He was always the life and soul of the party, a great raconteur, and his death on 16 April 1995 was a great loss to all his friends there.
My thoughts go back to March 1945 when the situation on all fronts was relatively stable and the feeling among us young soldiers could still be described as confident. We had not been brought up to political contemplation. The situation appeared different at home in the now surrounded remains of the Reich, where there was already a widespread feeling of defeat, although the transport system was intact and food supplies still reaching the population.
I was already 21 years old and had passed a company commanders’ course at the Boehm-Kaserne in Hamburg-Rahlstedt, when on Good Friday, 30 March 1945, I received my orders to join the troops on the Eastern Front. I said farewell to my family and remaining circle of friends with truly mixed feelings; as, the longer the war lasted, the more difficult it was for a soldier to return to the front. I had already been wounded twice in action in Russia. The feeling of parting was, in view of the strange situation, hard to describe, inwardly burdened with the uncertainty of the future, yet outwardly confident nevertheless. For us the collapse of the Reich and of the Wehrmacht was unimaginable and one’s own ignorance about what was happening was deliberately suppressed and played down. So I set off with three other comrades full of inner tension on the adventurous route to Berlin, a city which, even in the sixth year of the war, had not lost its appeal and radiance as a metropolis.
Naturally we had a night out ‘on the town’ in Berlin at a small bar on the Kurfürstendamm. Next morning, Easter Saturday, 31 March 1945, we continued our journey to Fürstenwalde, until then still a delightful little town. It made a great impression on us, being accustomed to living in one destroyed city after another. (Just three weeks later I came through here again freshly wounded and found only a dead town of smoking rubble.) At the Movement Office in Fürstenwalde we were directed to exactly where our unit was at the moment, namely in Seelow and in positions in the Oderbruch eastwards of there opposite Küstrin. Our destination was Seelow.
There was a train laden with supplies for our unit (20th Panzergrenadier Division) at the railway station. Departure was expected at dusk, as Seelow already lay in the combat zone. The designation HKL (Hauptkampflinie = Main fighting line) had been given up at the end of the war and replaced by a new term ‘Kampfraum’ (combat zone) covering an area about 3 kilometres deep. Thus Seelow was in the front line and the population had been evacuated.
Our train moved off and groped its way, fully blacked out and without any lights at all, almost step by step through the night; part of the route being visible to the enemy. Familiar flares stood in the sky above the front; single tank gunshots bellowed through the night, and heavier gun barrels boomed and thundered their greetings from here and there and all around, while machine guns rattled sporadically in the distance. Although the train rolled on, the front had already bypassed us, and our senses adjusted once more to a different reality from that to which we were otherwise normally accustomed.
Finally the train drew up at a siding, a branch line to an agricultural barn on a small slope on the southwestern edge of Seelow, where we were cheerfully welcomed by our comrades. Suddenly we were hearing our Hamburg dialect again and the odd familiar smiling face with the right jokes on their lips. After my frightful experience in the bombing of Dresden and having avoided the general rounding up of those heroes that had been grabbed and commandeered for a wild, emergency unit raised on the spot, I was happy to be back in one piece, with my unit at last. We used to call it ‘our gang’. People today would hardly credit it, but we young soldiers felt at home being back in our unit.