Berlin: The Downfall 1945

Hasso von Manteuffel’s so-called Third Panzer Army, on the Oder front north of the Ninth Army, had little more than a single panzer division. The bulk of his divisions were also composed of composite battalions and trainees. General Busse’s Ninth Army was a similar hotch-potch. It even included an assault gun company wearing U-boat uniforms.

That sector of the Oderbruch front was almost entirely manned by training units sent forward with a small ration of bread, dry sausage and tobacco. Some soldiers were so young that they were given sweets instead of tobacco. Field kitchens were set up in the villages just behind the lines and the trainees were marched forward to start digging their trenches. A comrade, one of them wrote, was ‘a companion in suffering’. They were not a unit in any usual military sense of the word. Nobody, not even their officers, knew what their duties were or what they were supposed to do. They just dug in and waited. Jokes reflected their mood. One of the current ones, a captured soldier told his Soviet interrogator, was, ‘Life is like a child’s shirt — short and shitty.’

German soldiers with enough experience of war to know that any fool could be uncomfortable took great pride in creating a ‘gemutlich’ ‘earth bunker’, usually about two metres by three metres, with small tree trunks holding up the metre of earth cover above. ‘My main dugout was really cosy,’ wrote one soldier. ‘I turned it into a little room with a wooden table and bench.’ Mattresses and eiderdowns looted from nearby houses provided the final home comforts.

Since firelight or smoke attracted the attention of snipers, soldiers soon gave up shaving and washing. Rations started to get worse towards the end of March. On most days, each soldier received half a Kommissbrot, a rock-hard army loaf, and some stew or soup which reached the front at night, cold and congealed, from a field kitchen well to the rear. If the soldiers were lucky, they received a quarter- litre bottle of schnapps each and, very occasionally, ‘Frontkampferpackchen’ — small packs for frontline combatants containing cake, sweets and chocolate. The main problem, however, was the lack of clean drinking water. As a result many soldiers suffered from dysentery and their trenches became squalid.

The faces of the young trainees were soon gaunt from tiredness and strain. Attacks by Shturmovik fighter- bombers in clear weather, the ‘midday concert’ of artillery and mortar fire, and random shelling at night took their toll. From time to time, the Soviet artillery ranged in on any buildings, in case they contained a command post, and then fired phosphorous shells. But for the young and inexperienced, the most frightening experience was a four-hour stint on sentry duty at night. Everyone feared a Soviet raiding party coming to grab them as ‘a tongue’.

Nobody moved by day. A Soviet sniper shot Pohlmeyer, one of Gerhard Tillery’s comrades in the ‘Potsdam’ Regiment of officer cadets, straight through the head as he climbed out of his slit trench. Otterstedt, who tried to help him, was also picked off. They never spotted the muzzle flash, so they had no idea where the shot had come from. The Germans on that sector, however, had their own sniper. He was ‘a really crazy type’ who dressed up when off-duty in an undertaker’s black top hat and tailcoat, to which he pinned his German Cross in Gold, a vulgar decoration known as ‘the fried egg’. His eccentricities were presumably tolerated because of his 130 victories. This sniper used to take up position just behind the front line in a barn. Observers with binoculars in the trenches would then relay targets to him. One day when little was happening, the observer told him of a dog running around the Russian positions. The dog was killed with a single shot.

Ammunition was in such short supply that exact figures had to be reported every morning. Experienced company commanders were over-reporting expenditure to build up their own reserves for the big attack, which they knew must come soon. German formation commanders became increasingly uneasy during that last part of March. They felt that the Soviets were playing with them ‘like a cat with a mouse’, deliberately achieving two goals at once. The battle for the bridgeheads on the west side of the Oder was not only preparing the Red Army’s springboard for Berlin, it was also grinding down the Ninth Army and forcing it to use up its dwindling supplies of ammunition before the big attack. German artillery guns, restricted to less than a couple of shells per gun per day, could not indulge in counter-battery fire, so the Soviet gunners were able to range at will on specified targets, ready for their opening bombardment. The major offensive against the Seelow Heights towards Berlin was only a matter of time.

Soldiers passed the day either catching up on sleep or writing home, even though little post had been getting through since the end of February. Officers felt that this collapse of the postal system at least had one advantage. There had been a number of suicides when soldiers received disastrous news from home, whether damage from bombing or members of the family killed. Captured German soldiers told their Soviet interrogators, and it is impossible to know whether they were speaking the truth or trying to curry favour, that their own artillery fired salvoes to explode behind their trenches as a warning not to retreat.

Soldiers knew that they were going to be overwhelmed and they waited only for one thing, the order to retreat. When a platoon commander rang back to company headquarters on the field telephone and received no reply, there was nearly always panic. Most jumped to the assumption that they had been abandoned by the very commanders who had ordered them to fight to the end, but they did not want to risk the Feldgendarmerie. The best solution was to bury themselves deep in a bunker and pray that Soviet attackers would give them a chance to surrender before chucking in a grenade. But even if their surrender was accepted, there was always the risk of an immediate German counter-attack. Any soldier found to have surrendered faced summary execution.

Despite all its weaknesses in trained men and ammunition, the German Army at bay could still prove itself a dangerous opponent. On 22 March, Chuikov’s 8th Guards Army attacked at Gut Hathenow, on the treeless flood plain near the Reitwein Spur. The 920th Assault Gun Training Brigade with the 303rd Doberitz Infantry Division was alerted. They deployed rapidly on seeing T-34 tanks. Oberfeldwebel Weinheimer yelled his fire orders: ‘Range — Armour-piercing — Target — Fire!’ Gerhard Laudan reloaded as soon as the gun recoiled. The crew established a good rhythm of firing. They hit four T-34S in a matter of minutes, but then there was a blinding flash of light and they felt a huge blow as their armoured vehicle shuddered. Laudan’s head struck the steel plate. He heard their commander scream, ‘Raus! ’ Laudan forced open the hatch to throw himself out, but was yanked back by his headset and microphone, which he had forgotten to detach. By the time he had extracted himself with only minor wounds, he found the rest of the crew outside sheltering in the lee of the vehicle. Amid the chaos of enemy tanks charging around, there seemed to be no chance of rescue or recovery. But then their driver, Soldat Klein, climbed back into the vehicle through a hatch. To their astonishment, they heard the engine restart. They scrambled back inside and the vehicle reversed slowly. They found that the enemy shell had struck the armour near the gun, but fortunately there was a gap there between the outer armour and the inner steel skin of the hull. This had saved them. ‘For once “soldier’s luck” was on our side,’ Laudan commented. They were even able to drive the vehicle back to the brigade repair base at Rehfelde, south of Strausberg.

Both on the Oder front and on the Neisse opposite the 1st Ukrainian Front, officers suffered from mixed feelings. ‘Officers have two opinions of the situation,’ Soviet interrogators reported, ‘the official version and their own views, which they share only with very close friends.’ They firmly believed that they had to defend the Fatherland and their families, yet they were well aware that the situation was hopeless. ‘One should distinguish between regiments,’ a captured senior lieutenant told a 7th Department interrogator at 21st Army headquarters. ‘The regular units are strong. The discipline and fighting spirit are good. But in the hastily thrown-together battle- groups, the situation is totally different. Discipline is terrible and as soon as Russian troops appear, the soldiers panic and run from their positions.’

‘To be an officer,’ another German lieutenant wrote to his fiancee, ‘means always having to swing back and forth like a pendulum between a Knight’s Cross, a birchwood cross and a court martial.’

11. Preparing the Coup de Grace

On 3 April, Marshal Zhukov flew from Moscow’s central airfield back to his headquarters. Konev took off in his aeroplane almost at the same time. The race was on. The plan was to launch the offensive on 16 April and to take Berlin on 22 April, Lenin’s birthday. Zhukov was in constant touch with the Stavka, but all his communications with Moscow were controlled by the NKVD in the form of the 108th Special Communications Company attached to his headquarters.

‘The Berlin operation… planned by the genius commander-in-chief, Comrade Stalin’, as the political department of the 1st Ukrainian Front put it so diplomatically, was not a bad plan. The trouble was that the main