Busse’s men were spread over a wide area, with large groups around Halbe, and others stretching most of the way back to Storkow, where the rearguard still held out against Zhukov’s forces. The Soviet attacks were designed to break up Busse’s forces into different pockets. During almost all hours of daylight, Soviet U-2 biplanes flew low over the tree-tops, trying to spot fugitive groups for the artillery and aviation to attack. Altogether, the air divisions supporting the 1st Ukrainian Front flew ‘2,459 attack missions and 1,683 bombing sorties’.
For the Germans in the forest, without maps or compasses, it was almost impossible to find their way. The smoke and the trees made it hard even to see the sun to estimate where west might lie. Most of the exhausted soldiers simply trudged along the sandy paths, leaderless and lost. There was great resentment against the ‘gentlemen of the staff’ in their clean uniforms, driven in their Kubelwagen vehicles, and apparently not picking up any of the wounded or those who had collapsed. All around crossing points of roads there was ‘a patchwork quilt of corpses, grey-green corpses’. Six soldiers from the 36th SS Grenadier Division commanded by Major General Oskar Dirlewanger, infamous for his role in the suppression of both risings in Warsaw, surrendered despite the risk of execution. ‘It’s already been five days since we’ve seen an officer,’ one of them said. ‘We feel that the war will end very soon, and the stronger this feeling becomes, the more we don’t want to die.’ It was rare for the SS to surrender. As far as most of them were concerned, capture meant a ‘shot in the back of the neck’ or a Siberian camp.
A terrible, one-sided battle developed round the large village of Halbe during 28 and 29 April as Soviet forces attacked from the south with katyushas and artillery. Many of the young Wehrmacht soldiers were shaking with fear and ‘literally shitting themselves’, according to Hardi Buhl, a villager. The local inhabitants were sheltering in their cellars, and when these terrified boy soldiers sought safety there too, they gave them clothes. But SS soldiers, on realizing what was happening, tried to stop it with reprisals. Hardi Buhl was with his family in their cellar, which was packed with other families and soldiers — some forty people in all — when an SS man appeared with a panzerfaust, which he aimed at the cowering inmates. The explosion in such a confined space would have killed them all. But before he fired, a Wehrmacht soldier in the corner nearest the stairs, who had been hard to see in the gloom, shot him in the back of the neck. There were other reports of shooting between SS and Wehrmacht around Halbe, but they are hard to verify.
Another attempt to break out westwards was made from Halbe by the central group. Siegfried Jurgs, a young officer cadet with Fahnenjunker Regiment 1239, described in his diary what he saw from his position on the leading tank. Wounded, whom nobody helped, were left screaming by the side of the track. ‘I never suspected that three hours later, I would be one of them.’ As they attacked a Soviet blocking detachment, he had jumped down from the tank with the other infantry to take up position in the ditch. But then a mortar bomb exploded and he was pierced through the back by a large fragment of shrapnel. Another explosion left him with shrapnel in his shoulder, chest and again in his back. Jurgs was luckier than the wounded he had seen earlier. He was picked up by a truck a number of hours later, but these vehicles were overloaded with wounded and there were screams of pain from the back as they lurched and bumped in and out of potholes on the forest tracks. Those too badly wounded to be moved were left to suffer where they lay. Few had any strength left to bury the dead. At best bodies were rolled into a ditch or shell crater and some sandy soil thrown over them.
On forest tracks and roads, vehicles burned and horses lay dead in their traces, while others still twitched and thrashed in pain. The ground was littered with abandoned weapons and helmets, prams, handcarts and suitcases. Halbe itself was described by eyewitnesses as a vision of hell through war. ‘Tanks rolled down the Lindenstrasse,’ the seventeen-year-old Erika Menze recorded. ‘They were covered with wounded soldiers. One of the wounded soldiers fell off the back of one. The following tank crushed him completely and the next tank after that drove over the large pool of blood. Of the soldier himself, there remained no trace.’ Outside the bakery, the pavement was literally covered with corpses. There was no space between them. ‘The heads were a yellowish grey, squashed flat, the hands a grey-black. Only wedding rings glimmered gold and silver.’
Fewer and fewer vehicles were left each day — several tanks, eight-wheeler armoured reconnaissance vehicles and some half-tracks. The vast majority of the soldiers were on their feet. On 29 April after dawn, the rain stopped and the sun came out a little. It was enough to get a rough idea of direction.
Survivors remember moments which seemed so unreal that they wondered afterwards if they had dreamed them in their exhaustion. Near Muckendorf, an officer cadet threw himself to the ground like the other soldiers with him when a hidden sub-machine gunner to their flank opened fire on them. They began firing back into the underbrush, unable to distinguish a target. Suddenly, two young SS women in black uniforms and armed with pistols appeared. ‘Get up!’ they screamed at them. ‘Attack, you cowards!’ At the end of what proved a very confused skirmish, there was absolutely no sign of the two ‘fanatics’.
The writer Konstantin Simonov happened to be on his way to Berlin in a jeep coming up the autobahn just after the main battle. On the stretch south of Teupitz, he saw a sight that he said he would never forget. ‘In that place, there was rather thick forest on both sides of the autobahn, half coniferous, half deciduous, already becoming green. A cross-cutting, not wide, led through the forest on both sides of the motorway, and one wasn’t able to see its ends… [it was] packed with something incredible: a terrible jam of cars, trucks, tanks, armoured cars, vehicles, ambulances, all of them not only pushed closely against one another, but literally jammed over one another, overturned, standing on end, upset, breaking the surrounding trees. In this mess of metal, wood and something unidentifiable was a dreadful mash of tortured human bodies. And all this went on along the cutting, into infinity. In the surrounding forest — corpses, corpses, corpses, mixed with, I suddenly noted, ones who were still alive. There were wounded people lying on greatcoats and blankets, sitting leaning against trees, some in bandages, others still without any. There were so many of them that apparently nobody had yet managed to do anything about them.’ Some even lay on the edge of the autobahn, which was half-blocked by debris and covered in oil, petrol and blood. One of the officers with him explained that this group had been ‘caught by the massed fire of several regiments of heavy artillery and katyushas’.
Soviet political departments were working hard all this time to persuade survivors to surrender. A quarter of a million leaflets were dropped over the forest. Loudspeakers boomed messages pre-recorded by ‘antifascist’ German prisoners. And Soviet soldiers shouted through the trees, ‘
The most astonishing part of the story is not the numbers who died or were forced to surrender, but the 25,000 soldiers and several thousand civilians who succeeded in getting through three lines of Soviet troops to reach Wenck’s army round Beelitz. (Marshal Konev refused to accept that ‘more than 3,000–4,000’ eluded his forces.) There, between the forest and the Elbe, where safety lay with the Americans on the far bank, they were to face many more swings between hope and despair in the last days of the war.
At the time of the main battle round Halbe, Army Group Vistula headquarters decided that it must have lost all contact with General Busse. A Fieseler Storch light aircraft was sent with an officer to make contact, but this attempt failed utterly. The Ninth Army was on its own, thus confirming the collapse of Army Group Vistula as a coherent entity.
General Hasso von Manteuffel’s Third Panzer Army was already doomed once Rokossovsky’s 2nd Belorussian Front broke through across the lower Oder. General Heinrici gave Manteuffel permission to withdraw westwards into Mecklenburg, but deliberately avoided informing Field Marshal Keitel or General Krebs in the Fuhrer bunker, because this was in direct defiance of Hitler’s order.
Rokossovsky’s advance westwards between Berlin and the Baltic forced Heinrici and his staff to abandon their headquarters at Hassleben, near Prenzlau. On their withdrawal, they passed close to Himmler’s retreat of Hohenlychen. There they saw a Hitler Youth battalion with an average age of fourteen. The boys, staggering under the weight of their weapons and packs, were trying to put a brave face on it. One staff officer spoke to their commander, saying it was a crime ‘to send these children against a battle-hardened enemy’, but this did no good.
