IN LATE APRIL 1945, General Simpson’s Ninth US Army pushed toward the last remaining great river in Germany: the Elbe. He still hoped to jump the river, move toward Berlin, envelop Potsdam to the southwest, and then take the capital itself. Despite several near misses, all efforts so far to establish a bridgehead had failed.1 Those stepchildren of the bombing war, flak guns, again performed their by then customary role. Anti-aircraft guns from the flak ring around Magdeburg sprayed the Elbe, shredding a bridge that had come within two dozen metres of completion.2 German forces in Magdeburg itself held out to the last, only surrendering on April 17–18 following a devastating bombing raid by 350 airplanes.3
As German artillery held the Americans on the west side of the river, on Hitler’s orders General der Panzertruppe Walther Wenck’s new Twelfth Army pulled up to the Elbe at Dessau.4 This army officially had nine divisions, but most of these existed on paper only.5 Wenck and Simpson would soon meet on the same side of the river, but for the moment, Simpson was stuck on its left banks.
Hitler had invested great faith in General Wenck, who had served under Guderian and suggested the idea of creating a militia to defend Germany.6 Perhaps emboldened by Roosevelt’s death on April 12 (apparently a sign that providence, which had been less than kind to him since July 20, 1944, was again on his side), Hitler ordered Wenck on April 15 to jump the Elbe south of Dessau, smash through Simpson’s Ninth Army, and then relieve the Eleventh Army, which was trapped in the Harz.7 What was left of XXXIX Panzer Corps did launch an attack with two under-strength divisions, but it resulted only in their total destruction five days later.8
The Eleventh Army was, in any case, not terribly interested. Kesselring had given it several orders over the last few days: first to break out west, then to defend itself until Wenck broke through, and then to cut northeast toward Magdeburg.9 The army’s commander, General der Artillerie Walter Lucht, judged the orders impossible to implement and ignored them.10 Then a final order came through: slow the Americans’ advance by making a last stand.11 To the palpable relief of his men, Lucht instead redefined his task as holding his units together until the inevitable end.12 From April 15 to April 20, with the exception of the Brocken (the highest point in the Harz), Eleventh Army forces fought only a delaying action against the US First Army’s First and Ninth Infantry Divisions.13 By April 16, the Americans captured between one thousand and two thousand prisoners a day as one town or village after another fell; by the twentieth, German units were surrendering en masse.14 Over the next three days, the remaining stragglers and General Lucht himself walked quietly into captivity. Lucht’s surrender saved hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lives and allowed several beautiful cities in this underrated part of Germany—Quedlinburg, Goslar, and Wernigerode, among others—to emerge from the war intact.
As forces in the Harz surrendered, only Wenck’s Twelfth Army stood between Simpson’s Ninth Army and Berlin.15 Everyone, including Wenck, assumed the Americans would cross the Elbe and move on the capital. But Hitler, as ever building castles—or, perhaps, fortresses—in the sky, had more ambitious plans than defence for Wenck’s army. Before the Ruhr pocket collapsed, Oberst Günther Reichhelm and other key officers had been flown out; Reichhelm landed at Jüterbog airfield south of Berlin and was driven to OKH headquarters at Zossen.16 His old friend and Guderian’s former deputy, Walther Wenck, was there to greet him. Wenck had good news—Reichhelm was to be his deputy—and bad—he was to see Jodl and Hitler.17
At the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, Hitler got into an argument with the usually emollient Jodl over the value of downed trees and partisan warfare in the Harz before ordering Reichhelm to join Wenck.18 The only value added to this diversion was the promise of two hundred Volkswagen trucks. When Reichhelm went to Döberitz (just west of Berlin) to collect the vehicles, the logistics officer had only a tenth of that figure available and would only release them to Reichhelm after a lengthy bureaucratic battle. Rightly guessing that Wenck would establish a makeshift headquarters at an army armour school (Panzerschule) at Roßlau, some 125 kilometres southwest of Berlin near Dessau, Reichhelm succeeded in his rendezvous with Wenck.19
Shortly after Reichhelm arrived at Roßlau, an order to break out to the west had become an order to attack to the east: Hitler ordered him and Wenck to launch an assault toward Potsdam and Jüterbog and to link up with General der Infanterie Theodor Busse’s Ninth Army, after which a further attack toward Berlin would occur.20 Keitel came to them and gave the order in person on April 23, which he did with much waving of his field marshal’s baton.21 The order, and a related order to SS General Felix Steiner to drive his “army” south from Mecklenburg to cut off Zhukov’s advancing spearheads, was evidence of two types of disintegration: of Hitler’s mind, and of the regime he had governed for twelve years.22 The day before, Hitler had exploded in a deranged and hysterical fit when he learned that Steiner had neither the forces nor the will needed for an attack from the north.23
The question was whether Wenck and Reichhelm would lead the charge on Berlin. According to Reichhelm’s postwar account, the two men agreed early on that an assault on Berlin was impossible. They also agreed that all orders emanating from Berlin were utopian fantasies that were not worth implementing or altering. Reichhelm wrote after the war:
[It was a matter] of officers using what was left of the best of Germany’s youth … to save what could be saved and to prevent a collapse into total chaos … We instead used mobile battle tactics that used our troops for a temporary [zunächst], robust defence of the Elbe and limited, partial attacks, all with two goals: (i) controlling civilian panic in cities, on the roads, and among the fleeing refugees from the East and (ii) achieving some order for the imminent end of the war. [After restoring order on the Elbe,] an attack toward Berlin would allow us to save the largest number of Germans from the eastern enemy … and to prevent the planned destruction of those industries, businesses, and cultural monuments that had so far survived the bombing war.24
In his own account, Wenck had ordered an end to all offensive operations against the Americans on the Elbe on April 22—the day before Keitel saw him.25
After his meeting with Keitel, Wenck ordered one division to maintain its position at Barby, but he also sent battle-ready troops to positions along the Elbe between Coswig and Dessau, with orders to block movements from the south.26 He then ordered two further divisions to defend a bridgehead from movements from the east and northeast, and to secure the Elbe from Wittenberg and Coswig.27 This resulted in two fronts meeting in Coswig: one running east to Wittenberg, and another running west to Dessau. Both roughly followed the Elbe. Wenck then took the rest of the Twelfth Army northeast toward Beelitz, home of a military hospital at which one Corporal Hitler had been treated for wounds sustained at the Somme. As Wenck turned his forces east from Wittenberg toward Beelitz, he left only a “light screen” of forces facing the Americans.28
Now turned east, Wenck ordered an attack. His forces launched a furious assault between April 26 and 28 on the area between Wittenberg and Niemegk.29 Two strategies were at play: pushing into Berlin if Soviet resistance proved surmountable or, if it did not, pushing the Soviets back, forcing open a corridor from the Elbe, and allowing soldiers and civilians to stream westward.30 By April 27, the Twelfth Army reached the peak of its success. Its forces, trying to break toward Potsdam and Berlin, were blocked by General Dmitry Lelyushenko’s Sixth Mechanized Corps, which was throwing itself at Wenck’s forces near Brandenburg on the Havel.31 In the southeast, positions at Wittenberg were collapsing. On April 26, Twelfth Army forces, seeking to prevent the loss of life and the destruction of Martin Luther’s city, retreated from Wittenberg.32 Within the city, women hastily hid ammunition and weapons in their back gardens so that nothing would give the Soviets the impression that anyone in the city wanted a fight.33 Whether General Wenck intervened personally to save Luther’s city—also the general’s hometown—is unclear.
For a time, the Twelfth Army managed to hold and, to some degree, even threaten Soviet forces, particularly the Fifth Mechanized Corps, to the point where it desperately called in reinforcements.34 Because his recruits were young and because Wenck commanded a particular respect among them, Twelfth Army soldiers’ morale was unusually high at this late point in the war. One of the soldiers, future German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, later said “[We had] a feeling of loyalty, a sense of responsibility and comradeship.”35 Wenck himself praised their “outstanding fighting spirit” (“einen hervorragenden Kampfgeist”), a compliment that we might be tempted to dismiss as instrumental were it not for the fact that German generals often blamed inadequate troops for their defeats in the last year of the war.36 In one particularly daring move, XX Corps moved back toward the military hospital at Beelitz-Heilstätten, surprising Soviet forces there and rescuing three thousand wounded German soldiers, who were transported back west to be handed over to the Americans.37 The rescue was possible only, as the Germans noted, because the Soviets had spared them—a degree of respect that the Germans had rarely accorded to Soviet prisoners of war.38 These German successes, however, could only be short-lived. By April 29, the Twelfth Army was exhausted and without direction. After April 30, no more orders arrived from Berlin.39 Throughout this period, forces under Wenck’s command committed at least one unadulterated act of disobedience: the general refused to destroy one of Berlin’s most important power stations, the Kraftwerk Zschornewitz south of Dessau.40 Reichhelm also indicated after the war that the commanders of the larger cities within the area under the Twelfth Army were each ordered to maintain their defences “only as long as necessary for planned operations and movements.” This contributed to Wittenberg, Brandenburg (on the Havel), and Rathenow escaping the fate to which Hitler had consigned them.41
*
THE CAPITAL WAS BY THEN under a full Soviet siege. The Soviets had pushed their way into the centre and surrounded the Gestapo headquarters in the Prinz-Albrecht-Straße. The Führer bunker near the Wilhelmstraße was just a few short blocks away. Throughout the capital and the Reich, any shred of a will to resist on the part of the civilian population—and there had only been a shred since at least January—completely vanished, and this in turn led to what the National Socialists delicately called “a disintegrating influence on the troops.”42 Reports of Himmler’s entreaties to the Allies made their way, via British or American wireless, back to Sipo and SD chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner. Himmler, about to be sacked for treason, was forced to denounce the “malicious perversions” and to assure Kaltenbrunner that he, Himmler, was committed to fighting on.43
Two days later, on May 1, rumours of Hitler’s death began to circulate with immediate effects on the ground.44 Doctors at army hospitals felt sufficiently emboldened to expel wounded SS officers to make room for Wehrmacht soldiers.45 In the west, naval war staff sent out some of their last orders countering scorched earth: it ordered that German harbour installations west of Swinemünde (Polish: Świnoujście) were to be crippled only if directly threatened by the British and the Americans; otherwise, no demolition of quay walls or equipment and no mining of the harbours was to occur.46 The same order went out for Danish ports, with the exception of the West Jutland harbours, which were to be destroyed as ordered.47
With the Twelfth Army repulsing Soviet attacks at Beelitz, Wenck was preparing the evacuation.48 He hoped to hold the front until what was left of the Ninth Army could retreat across it and then to pull the entire front back toward the Elbe.49 His orders to his troops were clear: they were to fight the Soviets to the last bullet, launch a fighting retreat of the Twelfth and Ninth armies, and open negotiations with the Americans.50 In the middle of all of this, a plane from Berlin arrived with propaganda leaflets urging the defence of the capital and the Führer. Wenck had the papers burned.51
In preparation for the Ninth Army’s arrival, and to care for the tens of thousands of civilians who were streaming west, Wenck set up field kitchen units that were feeding some 25,000 soldiers in addition to thousands of civilians. On May 1, the Ninth Army finally arrived. The 25,000 to 30,000 troops who made it had been thoroughly ravaged by the Red Army. They had lost all their heavy weapons as well as most of their light ones. Worse still, they were so exhausted, apathetic, and disoriented that even harsh orders and threats often failed to persuade them to take a single step farther.52 “Sometimes we even had to beat them [to get them into the trucks],” Reichhelm later remarked. “It was terrible.”53 Wenck had them transported toward the Elbe.
With Ninth Army soldiers loaded into anything that would move, the fighting withdrawal was on—and not a moment too soon. On May 2, Red Army forces broke into Havelberg. A regiment of Infantry Division Hutten rushed into the city, but it was not to be retaken.54 Fighting hard, the regiment made a tactical retreat, hooked up with the northern flank of XXXIX Panzer Corps, and moved in a fighting retreat back toward the Elbe.55 On May 3, Wenck ordered General der Panzertruppe Maximilian von Edelsheim to relinquish command of XLVIII Panzer Corps and to report immediately to Twelfth Army headquarters.56 Wenck then told him to go to Tangermünde, a small city on the Elbe north of Magdeburg and directly west of Berlin, and to make an offer of capitulation to General Simpson.57
At noon on May 3, a delegation crossed the Elbe in an amphibious truck; they were taken to a Lieutenant Colonel Fresner.58 Edelsheim said a capitulation decision would be made at Stendal on the morning of May 4 at 8:00. The next morning, the chief of staff of the American Ninth Army met the German delegation. Edelsheim requested assistance in transferring Germans across the Elbe in this order: sick and wounded soldiers (mostly from the Ninth Army) and civilians, refugees from the east, and finally Twelfth Army fighting troops.59 Edelsheim also requested technical assistance in building a bridge across the Elbe and in transferring refugees.60 Citing agreements with the Soviets and the limits of territory under its control, the Americans denied all assistance and civilian access but allowed the Twelfth Army to use a damaged bridge at Tangermünde for pedestrian traffic as well as ferries at Tangermünde, Schönhausen, and Ferchland.61 At this point, 90,000 to 100,000 troops and many more civilians were within Wenck’s Twelfth Army perimeter.
The evacuation began the next morning. The perimeter was at this point less than twenty-five kilometres long and some eighteen kilometres deep.62 Wenck ordered the evacuation of wounded troops, chiefly from the Ninth Army, first.63 With Soviet shells and artillery hammering the perimeter on all sides, killing soldiers and civilians alike, Twelfth Army soldiers ferried the wounded across the Elbe at Ferchland, helped them across the heavily damaged railway bridge between Stendal and Schönhausen, and carried them across what was left of the bridge at Tangermünde.64 There is no record of civilian reaction within the perimeter, but it must have been one of total panic.
By May 6, forces guarding the perimeter were running out of ammunition.65 The perimeter had now shrunk to eight kilometres. Wenck issued a second evacuation order: to withdraw the fighting troops.66 Tens of thousands of soldiers made for the ferries and tattered bridges. Civilians, including women wearing helmets given to them by soldiers, Soviet-born Wehrmacht soldiers, and members of the SS tried to slip into the crowds, but the Americans often caught them, particularly the women.67 On the eastern side of the Elbe, many of those who could not cross killed themselves.68
Then luck intervened. As the perimeter shrank, Soviet fire raked not only Germans but also Americans, particularly those checking the identities of Germans on the eastern side of the Elbe. Simpson ordered them back across the river and, for good measure, pulled all his forces back from the Elbe.69 One suspects that both sentiment and strategy informed the second order, but at the very least he could not have been unaware of the humanitarian consequences. The refugees surged toward the water. With the strong swimming and the weak and children pulling themselves across on makeshift lines, they tugged themselves over the river.70 In a sort of mini German Dunkirk, people boarded dinghies, canoes, skiffs, and every other craft available. Some soldiers shot themselves; strong currents swept others, along with many women and children, away.71
On May 7, the perimeter collapsed, and Wenck ordered an end to the evacuation.72 It was now every man for himself. German soldiers destroyed their guns and made for the river. Before crossing, the men of the Division Scharnhorst shouted a “thundering” Sieg Heil, pathos and bitter defiance mingling as the last of the Twelfth Army disintegrated.73 Wenck stayed in his headquarters at Schönhausen to the very last minute, perhaps contemplating how the town’s famous son, Otto von Bismarck, would view Germany’s decision to tangle with the Soviet Union. Wenck was among the last to get into the boats, and he, Reichhelm, and a few officers crossed the river under fire.74 Soviet bullets hit two of his NCOs, one fatally.75 Once across, they walked calmly into captivity. On the other side of the Elbe, Soviet forces enveloped the tens of thousands of refugees and thousands of Soviet “Hiwis” (volunteers) who had not made it across in time.76 Many of the refugees had trekked hundreds of kilometres ahead of the Red Army only to be a captured by it within a few metres of safety. But 100,000 soldiers and an unknown number of civilians had made it.77
The next day, the man who had ordered Wenck to Berlin, Feldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel, travelled to a former Wehrmacht officers’ mess hall at Karlshorst, in the southeast of the capital. A few minutes after midnight, he signed Germany’s unconditional surrender.
Notes
1. Weigley, Eisenhower’s Lieutenants, 688–90.
2. For the details, see ibid., 690–1.
3. Kershaw, The End, 297.
4. Walther Wenck, “Bericht über die 12. Armee für ‘Historical Division US Army,’” April 20, 1945, USAMHI, B 394, 2.
5. Günther Reichhelm, “Das letzte Aufgebot: Kämpfe der deutschen 12. Armee im Herzen Deutschlands zwischen West und Ost vom 13.4.1945–7.5.1945,” May 31, 1947, USAMHI, B 606, 5.
6. Yelton, Hitler’s Volkssturm, 12.
7. Wenck, “Bericht über die 12. Armee,” 2–3; “Walter Wenck: General der Panzer Truppe,” n.d., USAMHI B 394; Reichhelm, “Das letzte Aufgebot,” 9.
8. Reichhelm, “Das letzte Aufgebot,” 9–10.
9. Fritz Estor, “Kämpfe der 11. Armee April 1945 in Mitteldeutschland,” January 3, 1947, USAMHI, B 581.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., 24; Walter Lucht, “Stellungnahme zu dem Bericht des Oberst Estor,” May 19, 1957, USAMHI, B 581.
13. MacDonald, Last Offensive, 404.
14. Ibid., 405; Estor, “Kämpfe der 11. Armee,” 45–7.
15. The Twelfth Army was made up of nine divisions, including Divisions Ulrich von Hutten, Scharnhorst, and Potsdam. “Walter Wenck: General der Panzer Truppe,” USAMHI, B 394.
16. Antony Beevor, Berlin: The Downfall 1945 (London: Viking, 2002), 200.
17. Ibid., 201.
18. Ibid.
19. Reichhelm, “Das letzte Aufgebot,” 9.
20. Wenck, “Bericht über die 12. Armee,” 3; Reichhelm, “Das letzte Aufgebot,” 22.
21. Erickson, Road to Berlin, 586. The official order came out on April 24. Reichhelm, “Das letzte Aufgebot,” 23–4.
22. On both orders, see Weinberg, World at Arms, 823.
23. Erickson, Road to Berlin, 586. The scene was portrayed with some brilliance by Swiss actor Bruno Ganz in the 2004 film Downfall and has since been parodied in countless YouTube videos.
24. Reichhelm, “Das letzte Aufgebot,” 5–6.
25. “Walter Wenck: General der Panzer Truppe,” USAMHI, B 394.
26. Reichhelm, “Das letzte Aufgebot,” 24. Division Scharnhorst.
27. Ibid. Division Hutten and Division Körner.
28. Ibid.; Beevor, Berlin, 285.
29. Reichhelm, “Das letzte Aufgebot,” 29.
30. Ibid., 26. On the corridor, see Beevor, Berlin, 285.
31. Reichhelm, “Das letzte Aufgebot,” 29; Erickson, Road to Berlin, 601.
32. Reichhelm, “Das letzte Aufgebot,” 29. Reichhelm incorrectly cites the date of Wittenberg’s fall as April 28. Although most troops pulled out, some scattered resistance remained, which the Soviets had to fight “street by street.” Gottfried Herrmann, “… Wittenberg brennt …” 1945: das Kriegsende in der Lutherstadt Wittenberg, den Städten und Dörfern des Flämings und der Elbaue (Wittenberg: Drei Kastanien Verlag, 1999), 131–2.
33. Herrmann, “Wittenberg brennt,” 128.
34. Erickson, Road to Berlin, 601.
35. Beevor, Berlin, 286, quoting an interview with Genscher.
36. Wenck, “Bericht über die 12. Armee,” 3. “Poor forces” is a consistent term among the general’s reports in the USAMHI’s Foreign Military Studies’ archives.
37. Reichhelm, “Das letzte Aufgebot,” 30.
38. Ibid.
39. Wenck, “Bericht über die 12. Armee,” 6.
40. Reichhelm, “Das letzte Aufgebot,” 15. The forces were of the Infantry Division Hutten. Reichhelm notes that this was apparently only one example and that, under Wenck’s command, the scorched-earth orders were hindered “almost everywhere” in the Twelfth Army’s area.
41. Ibid.
42. “Boniface” report, April 24, 1945, UKNA, HW 1/3720.
43. Telegram from Himmler to Kaltenbrunner, April 30, 1945, UKNA, H1/3741.
44. Telegram from Commander in Chief, Naval Chief Command West to Commander in Chief, Navy, May 1, 1945, UKNA, H1/3541. Also see the telegram from Himmler to Kaltenbrunner, April 30, 1945, H1/3741.
45. Telegram from Berger to Himmler, May 1, 1945, UKNA, H1/3744.
46. Naval Headlines 1398, May 2, 1945, UKNA, H1/3544.
47. Ibid.
48. Beevor, Berlin, 377.
49. Reichhelm, “Das letzte Aufgebot,” 31.
50. Ibid., 31–2.
51. Ibid., 30.
52. Ibid., 33.
53. Quoted in Beevor, Berlin, 378.
54. Reichhelm, “Das letzte Aufgebot,” 34.
55. Ibid., 34–5.
56. Maximilian von Edelsheim, “Surrender of the Twelfth Army,” May 4, 1945, USAMHI, B 220.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid.
59. Edelsheim, “Surrender of the Twelfth Army”; Reichhelm, “Das letzte Aufgebot,” 37.
60. Edelsheim, “Surrender of the Twelfth Army.”
61. Ibid.
62. Beevor, Berlin, 396.
63. Ibid.
64. Reichhelm, “Das letzte Aufgebot,” 37.
65. Ibid., 39.
66. Ibid.
67. Beevor, Berlin, 396.
68. Ibid.
69. Ibid., 397.
70. Ibid., 397–8.
71. Ibid., 398.
72. Reichhelm, “Das letzte Aufgebot,” 39; Beevor, Berlin, 398.
73. Ibid.
74. Edelsheim, “Surrender of the Twelfth Army.” Wenck’s boat was a rubber raft according to Reichhelm, “Das letzte Aufgebot,” 39.
75. Beevor, Berlin, 398.
76. Edelsheim, “Surrender of the Twelfth Army.”
77. Reichhelm, “Das letzte Aufgebot,” 40.