The Pocket Shrinks
27 APRIL 1945
Fragmentary break-out attempts from Halbe continued from the night before, and 1st Guards Breakthrough Artillery Division claimed to have destroyed four infantry companies, eight machine guns, neutralized a howitzer battery, killed 130 Germans and captured a further 35, plus an artillery piece.1
However, one break-out group took the village of Zesch and reached as far as the Soviet third cordon at Neuhof on the Zossen–Baruth road (Reichsstrasse 96) in the north, while a few small groups managed to get through the third cordon on the Zossen–Baruth road and reached as far as Paplitz in the south. The 13th Army’s 395th Rifle Division in its fire-brigade role and 4th Guards Tank Army’s 68th Guards Tank Brigade counterattacked, leading to some heavy fighting around Zesch. Further south another group was driven out of Dornswalde by 96th Guards Rifle Division of 28th Army’s 3rd Guards Rifle Corps. The soldiers breaking out of the encirclement fought as their predecessors had done of old, but their attacks were checked and their combat teams shattered. Partly surrounded once more, they suffered heavy casualties, and only a very few were able to flee unnoticed into the surrounding woods and hide. Soviet claims for the day amounted to 6,200 prisoners, 47 tanks and APCs, 180 guns and mortars, and 1,132 vehicles captured.2
Extracts from the diary of a soldier from Hamburg, later killed, describe events that day:
After I had made a few notes in my diary, we had to move on again. Our transport and everything was left behind – even though the vehicle was carrying several wounded – and we moved off to the right from the road into a wood. There we came across a large group of stragglers and were told that in the last pocket everything had had to be left for Ivan – vehicles, supplies, ammunition, wounded – and those who had had enough had surrendered to the enemy.
We then came to some marshes that deprived us of the last of our strength. The second lieutenant from the previous day and a captain lay down on the saturated ground, their strength at an end. The captain pulled himself up, propped himself against a tree trunk and said: ‘Comrades, I am disbanding our group. Whoever thinks he has to, push through to Berlin.’
I had lost Helmut in the confusion again. It was not long before I came to a barn that stood alone in the meadows. I crept inside and slept until the sun went down. The sleep had strengthened me, and when I opened my eyes, there was a captain and nine comrades lying beside me. They were all southern Germans who wanted to go home. They had a map and a compass, and I was invited to join them. They wanted to cross the Elbe near Wittenberg, and so I was happy to have at last found people wanting to get away from the Russians.3
This unknown soldier probably belonged to one of the many groups of men from the shattered 9th Army who had become separated from their units and were wandering around the woods afraid of capture by the Russians.4
Generals Busse and Wenck received a further order from Colonel-General Jodl that day demanding:
Concerted attacks by 9th and 12th Armies should serve not only to rescue 9th Army, but especially to save Berlin … XX Corps, after reaching the line Beelitz–Ferch, is to attack [north-east to] Löwenbruch–Stahnsdorf; 9th Army to thrust north via Trebbin, establish contact with 12th Army and cover the rear on the line Luckenwalde–Baruth.5
Major Brand of 21st Armoured Reconnaissance Battalion wrote about the situation within 21st Panzer Division:
Orders from above obviously still inevitably mean higher casualties on our side. Attempt on 27 April to convince General Marcks to break away from the Army and break through to the west unilaterally. Marcks puts off the decision until later.6
General Marcks was a disciple of the fanatical Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner, who had set up flying courts martial to deal with any unauthorized troops found behind the lines or away from their units, and Colonel von Luck had previously lost a senior NCO escorting tanks sent back for repair as a result of this. From the comments of von Luck and Brand, there can be little doubt that Marcks was distinctly unpopular with his officers.7
Within the pocket communications continued to deteriorate. One German soldier noted that day: ‘The rumour is going around that we are breaking out.’8 In fact attempts were made to break out at several points of the encirclement, but there is no evidence as to who planned or ordered them. From the Soviet point of view, these were seen as important attempts to force a breakthrough by means of waves of attacks, but could in fact have been the efforts of individual units acting on their own initiative, or simply local counterattacks.
Marshal Koniev commented:
The stronger the pressure was exerted against them and the harder the blows they received from behind, the more vigorously they tried to break through to our rear. Each thrust from behind seemed to pass through them to us, in front. The enemy concentrated their battle formations and attacked us more and more actively. This was only to be expected, for there was no alternative but surrender.9
The pressure on the northern, eastern and southern parts of the perimeter were hard for 9th Army to take. Nowhere was it able to stop the advance of the overwhelming Soviet forces, the German troops having to give up more and more territory and villages.
The Gross Köris sector could no more be held than the gaps between the lakes near Prieros, Storkow and Wendisch Rietz, where the positions of 32nd SS Division and Panzergrenadier Division Kurmark had to be abandoned, their lines of retreat being strewn with vehicles, either shot-up or destroyed because of lack of fuel, and heavy weapons blown up for lack of towing vehicles or ammunition. SS-Captain Paul Krauss described the scene:
It was now just a matter of getting out of the ever-narrowing pocket to the west intact. More and more motor vehicles mixed with the horse-drawn carts of the refugees in column after column winding their way through the forest tracks to Halbe, where the break-out was to take place. All the time there were enemy ground-attack aircraft overhead shooting at the throngs of people and vehicles, causing casualty after casualty. Bodies were flying through the air; here and there vehicles were beginning to burn and falling apart; ammunition trucks were exploding. Chaos had begun and everyone pressed in from behind, no one wanting to leave the column or lose contact.
It was not until late afternoon on 27 April that the stream of vehicles ceased with only the odd column coming up behind. It appeared that the main body had reached Halbe.10
On the southern edge of the encirclement near Märkisch Buchholz, one of the important traffic junctions, fierce fighting took place, the village itself changing hands several times that day. Soviet armour finally reached the line Kuschkow–Schlepzig–Halbe–Löpten, and both Teupitz and Halbe were re-occupied by Soviet infantry, thus blocking off the whole break-out sector.11
During the course of the day the size of the pocket was not only considerably reduced, it was also split as a result of a thrust by troops of 1st Byelorussian Front’s 3rd Army from the Gräbendorf area west of Prieros as far as Gross Köris and Prieros, a move that the remains of 32nd SS Division and its tank-hunting battalion were unable to prevent. SS-Captain Krauss wrote of this many years later:
The 9th Army in the area south of Berlin was already in a big pocket that had become split into several small ones at Müllrose, Prieros and elsewhere. The Prieros pocket was about 21 kilometres across. In it were about 10,000–14,000 German soldiers of all arms of service and also about 20,000 civilians with their herds of cattle, individual animals, household articles; there were families, women with children, some on foot, some with horse-drawn carts, handcarts. All this under continuous artillery and mortar fire and air attack from the Russians, which could not fail to hit something each time. Conditions in the pocket were horrendous. Soldiers, civilians, children, women and vehicles moved round in a circle, trying to avoid the fire like a giant, thousand-legged worm biting itself in the tail. Officers, soldiers, civilians with their families, whole groups of German people were shooting themselves. I looked across at this spectacle shattered, stunned and helpless.12
Apart from Krauss’ report, little of this particular pocket is known, nor is anything to be found about it among Soviet sources.
However, the Army and Waffen-SS units taking the brunt of the fighting on the northern and eastern sectors of the perimeter had had enough, and at 1400 hours that day their commanders convened at the command post of XI SS Panzer Corps, which was located at the Birkbusch forest warden’s lodge, and told SS-General Mathias Kleinheisterkamp that, if he did not conduct an immediate break-out on his own initiative, they would do so themselves. (If this was the attitude of subordinate formation commanders, then confidence in General Busse and his headquarters was clearly lacking.) A break-out was then agreed for early next morning, providing the combat teams of 32nd SS Division could first disengage on the eastern sector of the perimeter along the line Eichholz forest warden’s lodge–Kehrigk–Bugk. As a preliminary measure, SS-Colonel Hans Kempin resumed command of the combat teams of V SS Mountain Corps that had meantime been detached to various commands over the past few days while securing this part of the perimeter.13
Meanwhile 9th Army reported by radio to Army Group Weichsel as follows:
V Corps: enemy penetrations near Märkisch Buchholz forced back. Enemy in Teupitz and Teurow. The redeployment of V SS Mountain Corps on the line Hartmannsdorf [near Lübben] Dürrenhofe–Kuschkow– Pretschen–Plattkow–Ahrensdorf–southern edge Scharmützelsee strongly pressed by the enemy.
XI SS Panzer Corps: breach between Gross Schauener See and Langer See.
The seriousness of the situation is reflected in this signal from Army Group Weichsel to 12th Army: ‘9th Army’s attacking spearheads at Mückendorf (NE of Baruth). Strong counterattacks. Help from the west urgently desired.’14 This was a request that 12th Army was no longer in a position to meet. Wenck’s troops were fully engaged all along the whole line of advance. The 9th Army would have to make its own way.15
The 1st Scharnhorst Grenadier Regiment took Reesdorf and was then ordered to stop and consolidate there, while the 3rd Scharnhorst on the right flank reached and held the line Schlalach–Brachwitz–Buchholz, dug in and repelled Soviet counterattacks. The Scharnhorst Infantry Division was supported in these operations by the 1170th SPG Brigade, which suffered heavy casualties in the process.16
Wenck’s attack had thus isolated 6th Guards Mechanized Corps from the rest of 4th Guards Tank Army at a time when this corps was extended over a distance of some 28 kilometres. The 5th Guards Mechanized Corps and 13th Army were having to form a double front, expecting Busse’s 9th Army to try and break out to the west at any moment from behind them, while the rest of 4th Guards Tank Army was still heavily engaged in the containment of the Potsdam and Wannsee ‘islands’.17
Next morning the Army Group’s situation report on the events of the 27th to the OKH contained the following:
Breakthrough attempt failed. Armoured spearheads with the most valuable elements have broken out to the west contrary to specific orders, or been destroyed. Other attacking groups have been stopped or in part thrown back with considerable loss. The physical and mental condition of officers and men, as well as the ammunition and fuel situation, allows neither a renewal of the planned break-out attack nor long holding out. Especially hard is the shattering misery of the civilian population concentrated in the cauldron. Only through the measures taken by all generals has it been possible to keep the troops going until now.18
By evening the remains of 9th Army had withdrawn back into the core of the remaining pocket, where the forests of Halbe and Märkisch Buchholz formed the assembly areas, resembling vast military encampments. Tanks and SPGs were to be used to provide the decisive thrust at the head of the breakthrough next morning. This time the attack would be along the line Halbe–Kummersdorf Gut. What nobody knew was that this led directly into the Soviets’ best prepared defences in depth.
Conditions for the remaining inhabitants of Halbe were described in various accounts. One of these came from Ingrid Feilsch, who was then 15 years old:
Hans, my eldest brother, was watching a wounded man being bandaged in the yard when the first shell hit the house. He was killed instantly. A French prisoner of war, who was living with us, brought him down into the cellar.
Next day another shell struck, killing my youngest brother, the three-year-old, in his cot, as well as a playmate and his grandmother. My mother lost both her feet. That was the most terrible thing. We looked for a medical orderly for hours, but where was the help? Mother cried until the next day, then she was dead. My five-year-old brother Ernst and myself were now alone. Father came back late from the war.19
Herr G. Fonrobert also described his experiences:
I myself experienced the horrific inferno of the bloody encirclement battle as a war-wounded civilian in a house in the Halbe settlement that changed hands three times in bitter, close-quarter fighting. The experience remains vividly in front of my eyes even today.
After the railway tracks at Halbe had been blown up by the engineers, there was a stream of hurrying people flowing through the streets of Halbe all day long. A chaotic confusion of wounded soldiers on different kinds of military vehicles, as well as refugee groups of mainly women and children, all seeking to escape from the Russians as a result of Goebbels’ lying propaganda.
Meanwhile our village had been occupied by SS and military police units, and soon afterwards we clearly heard the sounds of artillery and infantry fire. The civilians took shelter in their cellars.
And then at dawn on 25 April began the fearful slaughter of the Halbe pocket that was to last six days and six nights.
The air shuddered with the din of heavy weapons of all sizes, of tank battles, the roar of mortars, rockets and the rattle of machine guns, interrupted at times by strafing from Soviet ground-attack aircraft. There were seven of us in the cellar of our house, including a nine-year-old child, finally sitting quite apathetic and numbed by the ear-deafening explosions – sleep was out of the question – pressed close to the cellar walls and waiting for the end with horror after the neighbouring house had been torn in half by a shell and our own house had suffered considerable damage.
Following the bloody rounds of man against man around our house, in which there were dead and wounded, the soldiers of the Red Army finally occupied it and set up a command post in the living room upstairs and in the cellar, showing themselves to be very humane, giving us cigarettes and chocolate.
Later, eight male inhabitants of the settlement, including myself, were tasked by the Soviet military with seeing to the severely injured lying on the sports ground, but soon had to withdraw again and take cover, despite our white armbands, when we were fired on recklessly by the SS unit lying on either side of the sports ground and started taking casualties as civilians in the auxiliary medical service!
In seeking cover, we saw a frightful scene at a crossroads at the edge of the village. An anti-tank barrier had been attacked shortly before, and piles of bodies lay there, some in a cramped position and squashed by the tanks that had rolled over them, wounded crying out for help, dying horses trying to struggle up again, puddles of blood everywhere, burning and destroyed houses, collapsing ruins, abandoned guns and scattered equipment – a picture of horror and devastation, truly a face of war that could not be worse depicted.20
NOTES
1. Domank, ‘The 1st Guards Breakthrough Artillery Division at Halbe’.
2. Wilke, Am Rande der Strassen, p. 54.
3. Lakowski/Stich, Der Kessel von Halbe 1945, pp. 101–2.
4. Ibid.
5. Förster/Lakowski, 1945 – Das Jahr der endgültigen Niederlage der faschistischen Wehrmacht, p. 342 [citing Federal Military Archives RH W.30.10./6, Sheet 842].
6. Brand in the author’s Death Was Our Companion.
7. Von Luck, Gefangener meiner Zeit, pp. 259, 264–5, 270–1.
8. Lakowski/Stich, Der Kessel von Halbe 1945, p. 97.
9. Koniev, Year of Victory, p. 180.
10. Spaether, Die Geschichte des Panzerkorps ‘Großdeutschland’, pp. 637–8.
11. Kortenhaus, Der Einsatz der 21. Panzer-Division, p. 140.
12. Lakowski/Stich, Der Kessel von Halbe 1945, pp. 104–5, citing Krauß Report, 1997.
13. Wilke, Am Rande der Strassen, pp. 123–4.
14. Lakowski/Stich, Der Kessel von Halbe 1945, pp. 97–8.
15. Wenck, ‘Berlin war nicht mehr zu retten’, p. 66.
16. Gellermann, Die Armee Wenck, p. 84.
17. Tieke, Das Ende zwischen Oder und Elbe, p. 238.
18. Lakowski/Stich, Der Kessel von Halbe 1945, p. 105 [citing Federal Military Archives RH 19 XV/10, Sheet 393f.].
19. Halbe mahnt…! 1963 pamphlet, pp. 15–16.
20. Ibid., p. 17.