Late afternoon we received from Major Wandmaker, the new regimental commander, the collective order: ‘All 76th back to Diedersdorf!’
I remember the depression that came over us as we moved back defeated and exhausted through the countryside. The overwhelming might thrown against us had broken our backbone. Our regiment had ceased to exist as a regiment. It was the first time that I had experienced such a loss of self-confidence among our troops, as we recognised our powerlessness against this steamroller from the east. I was reminded of a line from our regimental song: ‘A Hanseatic regiment knows only victory – or death!’
Suddenly we found ourselves in an occupied anti-aircraft position. Two dug-in 88 mm guns, well camouflaged, thirty to fifty metres deep in the wood, with prepared avenues of fire. To our question: ‘What are you waiting here for? We are the last of the infantry – Ivan will be here in thirty minutes!’ came the answer: ‘We still have five armour-piercing shells left per gun, which will get us eight tanks and then allow us to blow up our guns with the last two – then we will come!’ About five to seven hundred metres further on the woods came to an end, and we arrived at our new positions another hundred metres on.
Here, every single soldier was personally briefed and given a specific combat task. In addition, Staff Sergeant Hellbrun was attached to me with several soldiers and we also got the support of three Jagdtigers from a Waffen-SS unit. In this connection, I must recall the unfortunate strength comparisons – what could three self-propelled guns do against the one hundred T-34 tanks we had had constantly in our view for the past two days? Despite the heavy losses we had inflicted on the Russians, reckoning on up to sixty or more shot-up and burning tanks per day, there were always new ones ready to come up against us. It was discouraging.[27]
At last, after two days, we were able to eat again. Everyone remained quietly in his corner. Shortly before dusk we suddenly heard the unpleasant howling sound of the anti-aircraft guns in front of us. This awakened a short and intense noise of gun fire and armour-piercing shells exploding at close range. As quickly as it had begun, the noise subsided again. How had it gone out there in front? To find out and re-establish contact with our anti-aircraft gunners, I sent a scout party through the woods. They reported back about ninety minutes later, with the news that there were seven burning T-34s in front of the woods opposite. A further twenty tanks had turned round and withdrawn out of firing range. Our anti-aircraft gunners were all fine and were calmly preparing their guns for demolition. That our men had not brought back the gunners with them immediately, or provided them with infantry fire cover until they could withdraw, proved to be a fatal tactical error next day.
For once we were not disturbed, the Russians also being quiet, and we assumed that nothing decisive would occur before sunrise. As I had been continuously on my feet for forty-five hours, I collapsed in my trench so exhausted that I slept like the dead. It was already light when I was cruelly awakened. I had slept through two heavy bombardments, so that my men thought I must have been fatally wounded. I had been so over-tired that even an artillery bombardment could not wake me. Harsh reality seized me once more.
All were in their firing positions, our nerves stretched to the limit. Suddenly we saw movement in the bushes at the edge of the woods. Figures emerged, and I could see how the Russians were preparing to feel their way forward. When they were about sixty to eighty metres away, I called out: ‘Fire at will!’
Our carbines and machine guns fired at the attackers. After our first or second burst of fire we heard German voices, ‘Comrades, don’t shoot, we are German!’
Immediately our weapons stopped firing. Since I had been asleep, I could not have known that our anti-aircraft gunners had not returned during the night. Between the attacking Russians we could now see some German helmets. For seconds there was a paralysing horror on our side.
Our fire resumed individually, but by now it was too late. The Russian artillery laid a barrage on the railway embankment behind us, as their infantry broke into our trenches. The picture that now plays in front of my eyes, still haunts me in my sleep. Although I had been a soldier for three and a half years, of which seventeen months had been in action with a front-line unit, I had never experienced anything like this, nor believed it possible. Men were fighting with clubs and knives just as in the Middle Ages.
‘I can’t take any more of this!’ I felt like shouting. When I stood up over the trench, a second of panic gripped me and I ran back to the wall of fire on the railway embankment. Subconsciously, I noticed that someone was following me. It must have been only seconds before we were about 50 metres from the railway embankment and crawling up it. Two terrifying explosions immediately behind us forced us against the embankment. Corporal Schröder asked me if I had been hit. Yes, a shot through the right lower leg and a hit in the left foot. For a moment I was unable to get up. Schröder himself must have been in the dead angle from the explosion, i.e. immediately next to it, and so was miraculously unwounded. He seized the initiative and quickly pulled me over the railway lines into cover on the far side.
As if ordered, there stood a motorcycle ready to go. So we drove across country in a northwesterly direction to a nearby wood, where Schröder tied me on in a makeshift fashion. Once ready, we were electrified by the sound of tracks of moving tanks. I could see tanks moving slowly toward us like an armada, snapping off the young trees of the little wood like matchsticks. Yet again, as on the previous day, our troops were being surrounded by tanks in a pincer movement and overrolled in a flanking action.
The condition of my unit and the naked fear of death gave me the strength to run. In order to survive, we had to reach the edge of the woods furthest from the tanks and cross the open field beyond. We went up a sloping meadow and had just reached the crest of the hill when we saw the heavy tanks driving out of the little wood. The Diedersdorf-Heinersdorf road, along which the remainder of our supply vehicles, some horse-drawn, were retreating, ran along the far side of the hill in dead ground to the Russians. With the last of my strength, I clambered up on to an open horse-drawn wagon, which took me to the Main Dressing Station in Heinersdorf.[28] The Russian tanks were firing from the edge of the wood, even though their shots could only reach the tops of the trees lining the road. Despite the splinters from bursting shells, nothing serious occurred.
Schröder left me at the Main Dressing Station with a heavy heart. I sat for one or two hours with a lump in my throat. I could hardly think, as the experience kept going around in my mind. Once I had been tended to and bandaged, I was laid on a stretcher outside; outside being an area the size of a football field, filled with with wounded soldiers laid out in rows on stretchers.
Like a flash of lightning from the sky, two Russian fighter-bombers suddenly attacked the Main Dressing Station at low level, mowing gaps in the rows of helpless men with their machine guns. They circled a couple of times repeating their murderous fire before flying off to seek new targets.
27
4 Presumably Panzerjäger Tiger Ausf B Jägdtigers of the SS Heavy Panzer Battalion 502, which had been lagered nearby. Heavily armoured and armed with an 88mm gun, these were in fact formidable fighting vehicles.
28
5 The Headquarters of the XIth SS Panzer Corps (see ‘The Siege of Klessin’) had been located here.