Aftermath
Immediately after the fighting ended the Soviet writer Konstantin Simonov was on his way to Berlin by jeep. As he drove along the autobahn past the Halbe break-out point near Teupitz he came upon an unforgettable sight:
Shortly before reaching the great Berlin Ring, I came across a sight that I will certainly never forget. In this area the autobahn is enclosed on both sides by thick woods that had been split by a cutting whose ends were out of sight.
The German troops that were still holding out on the Oder, when the fighting in Berlin had already started, had used this route to try and thrust their way across the autobahn. Before dawn, only a few hours previously, the intersection of the cutting and autobahn that we had reached had apparently become the site of their final defeat. In front of us lay Berlin, on our right the cutting completely blocked with quite improbable scenes – a pile of tanks, cars, armoured cars, trucks, specialized vehicles, ambulances, all literally piled up on top of each other, tipped over, sticking up in the air. Apparently while trying to turn round and escape, these vehicles had knocked down hundreds of trees.
And amid this chaos of iron, wood, weapons, baggage, papers, lay burnt and blackened objects that I couldn’t identify, a mass of mutilated bodies. And this carnage extended all along the cutting as far as I could see. All around in the woods there were dead, dead and yet more dead, the corpses of those who fell while running around under fire. Dead and, as I then saw, some alive among them. There were wounded lying under blankets and greatcoats, sitting leaning against trees, some bandaged, others bleeding and not yet bandaged. Some of the wounded, as I only later noticed, were lying along the side of the autobahn. Then I saw some figures moving among the wounded, apparently doctors or medical orderlies. That was all on the right-hand side.
The autobahn ran down the centre, a broad asphalted road that had already been cleared for traffic. Along a stretch of 200 metres it was pocked with small and large craters that the military vehicles driving to Berlin were having to zigzag round.
The cutting continued on the left-hand side, and part of the German column that had already crossed the autobahn was destroyed here. Again, as far as the eye could see, there was a mess of burnt-out, smashed, overturned vehicles. Again dead and wounded. As an officer hastily informed me, the whole of this vast column had come under fire from several regiments of heavy artillery and a few regiments of Katyushas that had previously been concentrated in the vicinity and had fired on the cutting on the assumption that the Germans would try to break through here.
We left this scene of horror and after a few kilometres saw a convoy of five or six ambulances coming towards us. Apparently someone had summoned reinforcements from our medical battalions but, considering the scale of the slaughter, these five or six vehicles would be no more than a drop in the ocean.1
This was the situation that faced the victors in May 1945. Apart from evacuating prisoners and tending to the vast numbers of wounded, the dead had to be buried as soon as possible, a gruesome task that was passed on to the local population, consequently mainly to women and teenagers, to which were added teams of former Nazi officials and prisoners of war.
Elisabeth Schulz gave her account regarding the fate of the wounded:
I was then nineteen years old and working as an auxiliary nurse in Schloss Baruth. At about 0900 hours on 20 April 1945 we were told that it was everyone for themselves. The wounded could not be taken along with us. We were three nurses, two medical orderlies and two Hiwis [Russian volunteers]. We decided to stay until all the wounded were gone. Some left on wagons with the nurses and doctors.
With part of the Schloss already on fire, we put the last eighteen severely wounded on a haycart. They were only wearing shirts, as the quartermasters had shut up shop and made off. What the poor boys had to suffer was indescribable, but there were no complaints. They were grateful for being saved, as they thought. The Hiwis had found two horses and we set off across the Schloss park. By the time we reached the meadows, the Russian tanks had already passed us, and there was firing from all sides. We quickly laid the wounded down on the grass and took cover. Everything then happened very quickly. We watched the Russians charge across the meadows and shoot medical orderlies, nurses and wounded. I have to thank my fellow nurse, Hedwig Steicke, for saving my life. She ran back with me across the park.
We lay there all night long and then joined the refugees from Baruth next morning, running for our lives across the meadows and being shot at by low-flying aircraft. We came to Radeland, where white flags already hung from the windows, and were most kindly taken in by the Hillebrands family, fed and clothed. Then the first Russians arrived and fighting started in the woods. We were hidden as well as possible in the hayloft. We two nurses then tended the German wounded that the local people brought to us in an abandoned farmhouse, laying them on straw, cutting off their blood-crusted uniforms, destroying the Waffen-SS uniforms, washing the wounded and trying to tend to them without medicine or bandages. Everything we could find was used. The people from the village helped with food, whatever they could find, for the hunger was very great. Even a doctor appeared from somewhere. We amputated with a handsaw. There was a terrible stench. All the amputees and the dead were put in a barn. There were 145 men with head or stomach wounds and they all died. Soldiers even died of tetanus from small wounds. We could only comfort them as they died. The youngest was only just sixteen years old. He died from a shot in the kidneys – very slowly. About 100 lightly wounded we treated as walking cases and sent them on. We worked day and night, and only slept in hiding. Whenever Soviet controls came, we would literally hold out the excrement buckets under their noses so that they would give up.
We did not record the names of the dead, as we had nothing to write with, and also no time. Apart from that, none of us believed that we would get back home alive. One of our doctors collected their identity discs. Hopefully, they reached the right place.
About mid-May Soviet officers made it clear to us that everyone that was half fit to work, or would soon be fit to work, would be deported to the Soviet Union. Several of us quickly got away, including myself. I only wish that some of them survived, so that our help had not been in vain.2
Expediency resulted in many of the dead being buried without any record of name or location being made, the bodies being dragged to and tipped into the nearest trenches and shellholes.
Herr G. Fonrobert, an inhabitant of Halbe, where some 4,000–5,000 had been killed,3 wrote:
After the surrender was finally achieved on 1 May, we inhabitants of the village were immediately put to burying the dead, and for weeks there was nothing else to think about, as thousands of bodies had to be buried, mainly in quickly-dug makeshift mass graves. And, as a result of the warm spring sunshine, it was necessary to do it quickly. Afterwards there were many months of superficial clearing up of the roads and woods of the war materiel of all kinds lying around, including shot-up army vehicles, guns and tanks that had to be towed away. But everywhere in the woods around for an even longer time there was a smell of decay and fire that persisted for months.4
Erwin Hillebrands, then twelve years old, related:
I remember 600–700 dead being buried in three layers in a U-shaped grave at the entrance to Radeland, civilians, soldiers and even children. They were carried out together from the fields and woods around, only a few from the village itself. This quick burial was carried out on the instructions of the Soviet commandant responsible. An epidemic had to be avoided. Sometimes the corpses fell apart or had been eaten by foxes. It was a nauseating task. They pushed the bodies with poles into a suitable or shallow hollow, or simply covered them with sand. If Soviet soldiers were present, it was strongly forbidden to remove the identity discs; the dead were to remain anonymous. The exhumation of this mass grave took place at night in about 1951.5
Hilde Neufert, who was twenty-two at the time, vividly recalled the horrors of this task:
When the fighting was over in Märkisch Buchholz, the Russians immediately ordered the men and women, the boys and girls too, to bury the dead, although ‘bury’ was hardly the right word for it.
There was a mobile workshop in our yard, and the Russians were recovering all kinds of vehicles from the woods. On one occasion there was a Wehrmacht ambulance full of corpses. We had to unload them, all of whom, apart from their wounds, had had a bullet in the back of the neck. We had to throw their bodies mostly into bomb craters, pits and trenches under the eyes of the guards, and then cover them over.
There was a big bomb crater near our house. Once it had been filled to the top, Christmas decorations that an officer had found in our house, balls and ribbons, were strewn over it and trampled in.
I can still recall today when we removed the dead from the woods outside the village and laid them down in a row on the roadside to await transport; it was quite a long row. Suddenly a tank appeared, which changed course from the middle of the road and rolled back and forth several times over the row of corpses. But that was not enough. Finally the tank swivelled around on the remains, mashing them into the sand, and the commander, an officer, shouted at us as we looked on in horror: ‘Gittler kapuut! Deitschland kapuut! Wehrmacht kapuut! Soldat kapuut! Nix mehr da! Ha-ha-ha!’
Then we had to pick up the squashed remains out of the sand with bloody hands and put them in a shellhole.6
Willi Klär concluded his account of events he witnessed at Kummersdorf Gut:
On the morning of 30 April the inhabitants left the cellar of the old folks’ home and returned to their own homes, only to be met by an horrific scene. Corpses were lying all over the place, about 2,000 of them, men, women and children who had been killed in the woods, in the village and on the ranges.
On the morning of 1 May all the men remaining in the village were rounded up at the old folks’ home, whose hall was crammed with wounded German soldiers. All who could walk, whether soldiers or civilians, were led off as prisoners to Sperenberg, where the square between the chemist and the station bar was crowded with them all. They were then divided up into large groups and marched off under escort towards Rehagen, Mellensee, Zossen, Nächst Neuendorf and Glienick to Gross Schulzendorf, which they reached at about midnight. The heavy firing in the battle for Berlin could be seen well from here.
The prisoners were then put in a camp behind barbed wire, a former German Army training camp on the road to Jühnsdorf, and everyone was given a small packet of crispbread.
Next morning, 2 May, most of the civilians were allowed to return home after being interrogated. It was a long march on foot from the Kummersdorf Ranges to Gross Schulzendorf and back, about 52 kilometres, and both days without food.
On 4 May the inhabitants of the village and ranges began digging mass and individual graves to get the dead under the earth for fear of an epidemic. The barracks continued to serve as a hospital for several months.7
The Soviet commanders responsible for arranging the burial of the war dead varied in practice regarding the treatment of the identity discs and paybooks of the German dead. In most cases it was forbidden to record the names of the dead and their effects had to be destroyed. Witnesses reported that in some instances only members of the Army, Navy or Air Force were given a proper grave, members of the Waffen-SS and even the Volkssturm being set aside and buried without markers. What happened to the dead policemen, who had fought in their distinctive green uniforms, is not known. In Halbe itself the identity of only about 300 of the dead could be established.
The Soviets saw to their own dead, with few exceptions avoiding the use of German cemeteries on ideological grounds. Instead they usually established their own cemeteries in the centre of villages or other prominent sites. The Soviet cemetery on Reichsstrasse 96 on the northern outskirts of Baruth was officially established on 7 November 1947 and contains some 1,300 of their dead in 22 mass graves, mainly men from 3rd Guards Tank Army, but these are by no means all the Soviet troops who died in the area.
The vast war cemetery at Halbe, the Waldfriedhof, or Woodland Cemetery, as it is discreetly known, came about as a result of the efforts of Pastor Ernst Teichmann and his wife. Upon his return from the war, during which he had been a padre with the Wehrmacht, Pastor Teichmann took over a parish in the Harz Mountains, where he started concerning himself with the graves of the war dead to be found there. He first heard about Halbe in 1947 and went to see for himself. At about the same time Berlin’s Bishop Dibelius managed to establish an Evangelical Church commission for the care of war graves in both halves of the city. Although the Volkssbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge (German War Graves Commission) was anxious to assist, it had no authority in East Germany, and could only provide support from behind the scenes. Then, on 29 July 1948, a war graves commission was established for the state of Brandenburg when the Soviet Military Administration passed the responsibility for this matter to the civilian authorities, ordering all identifications to be passed on to the German Red Cross in West Berlin for registration.
Pastor Teichmann applied and was accepted for the post of parish priest at Halbe in 1951 and eventually the Waldfriedhof was laid out in accordance with his recommendations. Meanwhile, despite the indifference and even hostility of the East German authorities, Teichmann and his wife, with the help of some members of the community, applied themselves assiduously to the task of identifying and reinterring the war dead from the area with reverence and care. He continued this work until his death in 1983. By the end of 1958 the official record showed 19,178 reinterred, and by the end of 1989 this had risen to 20,222 bodies, of which some 8,000 had been identified.
Not all the war dead came from the immediate vicinity, for East German expansion of open-cast coal mining in the Lausitz area resulted in most of the war dead from that area being transferred to Halbe. Remains are still being discovered at a rate of about 200 per year to add to the cemetery’s total. It also contains the remains of some 4,500 prisoners who died in the Soviet ‘Special Camp No. 5’ in Ketschendorf, near Fürstenwalde, during the period 1945–7. The Waldfriedhof is the largest military cemetery on German soil.8
The search for missing persons became a major task in post-war Germany, and few enquirers would be fortunate enough to receive such detailed information regarding the fate of a missing daughter, as was given in this letter written by a soldier four months later:
Meanwhile the Russians had surrounded the pocket that we wanted to escape from and we no longer had the slightest peace. We reached the Hammer–Halbe area in stages. I took your daughter, along with six other refugees, to just short of Hammer, where she could wait out the development of the overall situation herself. She returned that night to the place where we were parked, because Hammer was under fire and the cellars there were all full. Towards morning on 28 April we came under heavy mortar fire so withdrew further into the woods. With dawn all hell broke out from all sides. The first barrage went over us as we lay in a slit trench. At about 0840 hours there was another barrage during which a bomb from a heavy mortar hit a tree behind our trench and we were unlucky enough to have all the splinters shower down directly on our trench. I felt a piercing pain in my left shoulder and said to your daughter: ‘I’ve had it.’ Then I noticed that Traudel had started crying, and so had your daughter.
At first it looked like the effects of shock, until your daughter started groaning. The whole thing only lasted seconds. When I heard your daughter’s breathing, I realised what was wrong. Three large splinters had pierced her back and the air was coming out of her wounds. Comrades sitting in a hole nearby immediately took Traudel to the dressing station that was close by, as she had a small wound in her leg, while I attended to your daughter as far as my wound would let me. As she had lost consciousness immediately after being wounded, I could not communicate with her. Death followed very quickly, as the medical officer who had been summoned confirmed. We then buried your daughter in the trench in which she had so quickly met her fate.
I then went to the main dressing station to look for Traudel and get my wound dressed. I found Traudel there and took her with me to find transport. However, the artillery and mortar fire was so heavy that no transport was possible and we had to spend the whole day sitting in a foxhole. Then, at about 1900 hours that evening, we were taken to the Hammer forestry office. At the same time the Russians attacked us from the rear and we had no choice but to break out to the front.
The wounded who were unable to move remained lying where they were. My wound had become worse in that I now had fever and was shivering. I carried Traudel with my good arm about three kilometres towards Halbe, but my shoulder wound began bleeding from the effort and I lost so much blood that I could not go any further. Some comrades took Traudel on by vehicle to Halbe.
The whole break-out area lay under a frightful hail of fire such as I had never ever experienced before throughout the war. When I reach Halbe several hours later, it was no longer possible to get through. All the streets were jammed with shot-up and burning vehicles. While looking for Traudel at the many wounded collection points, I was wounded again by a shell exploding three metres away from me, getting splinters in the left knee and thigh. With the help of a comrade, I was able to slip into the cellar of the nearest house, where civilians bandaged me. I lay down there and was found by the Russians when they took the village during the course of the evening. A Russian officer had me immediately bandaged by a Russian medical orderly and came back two hours later with a German doctor and two stretcher bearers, who took me to the dressing station. My enquiries about Traudel were unfortunately unsuccessful. Traudel wore a small label with her Cottbus address on it under her coat, as I saw myself. Hopefully she has found her way to you in the meantime.
The whole episode in the Halbe area from 26 to 30 April was a catastrophe. From the 140,000 men who were in the pocket, more than 20,000 were killed and 10,000 wounded.
The fate of Frau Buhlmann and your Traudel has had the same effect on me as if they were my nearest kin. And during the few hours that I sat together with Traudel in the foxhole, I grew as close to the child as if she had been mine.9
But what happened thereafter to the principal protagonists in this drama?
General Busse (full name Ernst Hermann August Theodor Busse) was released by the Americans in 1947, and from 1950 until 1965 served as the principal adviser on Civil Defence to the Federal German Ministry of the Interior,10 for which he was awarded the Gross Verdienstkreuz mit Stern upon his retirement. He died at the age of 89 at Wallerstein in Bavaria on 21 October 1986.
Marshal Koniev served on the Allied Control Commission in Austria until he replaced Zhukov as Commander-in-Chief Land Forces in 1946. In July 1955 he was appointed the first Commander-in-Chief of the Warsaw Pact Forces, but had to give up the post through ill health five years later. Fully recovered, he was appointed Commander-in-Chief Soviet Group of Forces in Germany on 10 August 1961, just three days before the construction of the Berlin Wall began. One year later he transferred to the Group of Inspectors upon nominal retirement, and died aged 79 on 20 May 1975.
Marshal Zhukov stayed on as Commander-in-Chief of the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany until 1946, when Stalin appointed him Commander-in-Chief of Land Forces, but soon afterwards downgraded him to commander of the Odessa Military District and later to the Ural Military District, posts normally occupied by a colonel-general. Following Stalin’s death in March 1953, Zhukov became Minister of Defence in the new government under Nikolai Bulganin, receiving his fourth star as ‘Hero of the Soviet Union’ on his 60th birthday in 1956. He supported Nikita Khrushchev’s take-over in 1957 and was retained in his post, but upon returning from a triumphant visit to Yugoslavia and Albania in October that year, he was dismissed on charges of high-handedness, establishing a personality cult and obstructing Party work within the army.
Deprived of his positions as a member of the Presidium and the Central Committee, and as Minister of Defence, Zhukov withdrew to the dacha outside Moscow that Stalin had given him for life during the war. Pravda then published an article by Marshal Koniev that amounted to a scathing attack on Zhukov’s role during the war and as Minister of Defence. In March 1958 Zhukov was further humiliated by his contrived retirement as a Marshal of the Soviet Union, an unprecedented step, for marshals were normally transferred to the Group of Inspectors, whose occasional duties justified the continuation of their active-duty perquisites, such as an aide-de-camp and a chauffeur-driven car. Zhukov was now fair game for his old antagonists, and in March 1964 Chuikov attacked Zhukov in his book The End of the Third Reich, the first of the senior commanders’ memoirs allowed to be published after the war.
However, in 1965, under the Brezhnev regime, Zhukov was invited to attend a celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the victory over Germany, at which he received a great ovation. The next day he joined his old colleagues in reviewing the victory parade from the top of Lenin’s mausoleum. A request then arrived from a French publisher for permission to include a book on Zhukov in a series of twenty books on commanders of the Second World War. Somehow this request managed to get through the system, resulting in Zhukov producing his memoirs, upon which he had been working since his retirement. There followed considerable delays in obtaining official clearance, during which Zhukov suffered a heart attack, his second, but then the manuscript was eventually approved by no less than General Secretary Brezhnev, and by the end of April 1968 the book was on sale in Moscow. Despite an official ban on any form of publicity, Zhukov’s memoirs were an instant success, and the feedback from the readers, amounting to over 10,000 letters, encouraged Zhukov to start work on a second edition with his morale greatly enhanced. He died aged 77 in Moscow on 18 June 1974.
NOTES
1. Simonov, Kriegstagebücher, p. 105 f.
2. Schulze, Der Kessel Halbe–Baruth–Radeland, pp. 87–8.
3. Article by Günter Führling in Deutsche Militärzeitschrift, Nr. 14.
4. Halbe mahnt…! 1963 pamphlet, p. 17.
5. Schulze, Der Kessel Halbe–Baruth–Radeland, p. 54.
6. Schulze to author.
7. Ortschronik von Kummersdorf Gut. [Rolf Kaim to author]
8. Mihan article to author; Jörg Mückler in Deutsches Soldatenjahrbuch 2000–2001.
9. Halbe mahnt…! 1963 pamphlet, pp. 13–14.
10. The author was informed by another general present that Busse was given a very stony reception when he gave an address on Civil Defence to the Bundeswehr Senior Staff College at Hamburg after the war.