dusk we suddenly heard the unpleasant howling sound of the anti-aircraft guns in front of us. This awakened a short and intense noise of gun fire and armour-piercing shells exploding at close range. As quickly as it had begun, the noise subsided again. How had it gone out there in front? To find out and re-establish contact with our anti- aircraft gunners, I sent a scout party through the woods. They reported back about ninety minutes later, with the news that there were seven burning T-34s in front of the woods opposite. A further twenty tanks had turned round and withdrawn out of firing range. Our anti-aircraft gunners were all fine and were calmly preparing their guns for demolition. That our men had not brought back the gunners with them immediately, or provided them with infantry fire cover until they could withdraw, proved to be a fatal tactical error next day.
For once we were not disturbed, the Russians also being quiet, and we assumed that nothing decisive would occur before sunrise. As I had been continuously on my feet for forty-five hours, I collapsed in my trench so exhausted that I slept like the dead. It was already light when I was cruelly awakened. I had slept through two heavy bombardments, so that my men thought I must have been fatally wounded. I had been so over-tired that even an artillery bombardment could not wake me. Harsh reality seized me once more.
All were in their firing positions, our nerves stretched to the limit. Suddenly we saw movement in the bushes at the edge of the woods. Figures emerged, and I could see how the Russians were preparing to feel their way forward. When they were about sixty to eighty metres away, I called out: ‘Fire at will!’
Our carbines and machine guns fired at the attackers. After our first or second burst of fire we heard German voices, ‘Comrades, don’t shoot, we are German!’
Immediately our weapons stopped firing. Since I had been asleep, I could not have known that our anti- aircraft gunners had not returned during the night. Between the attacking Russians we could now see some German helmets. For seconds there was a paralysing horror on our side.
Our fire resumed individually, but by now it was too late. The Russian artillery laid a barrage on the railway embankment behind us, as their infantry broke into our trenches. The picture that now plays in front of my eyes, still haunts me in my sleep. Although I had been a soldier for three and a half years, of which seventeen months had been in action with a front-line unit, I had never experienced anything like this, nor believed it possible. Men were fighting with clubs and knives just as in the Middle Ages.
‘I can’t take any more of this!’ I felt like shouting. When I stood up over the trench, a second of panic gripped me and I ran back to the wall of fire on the railway embankment. Subconsciously, I noticed that someone was following me. It must have been only seconds before we were about 50 metres from the railway embankment and crawling up it. Two terrifying explosions immediately behind us forced us against the embankment. Corporal Schroder asked me if I had been hit. Yes, a shot through the right lower leg and a hit in the left foot. For a moment I was unable to get up. Schroder himself must have been in the dead angle from the explosion, i.e. immediately next to it, and so was miraculously unwounded. He seized the initiative and quickly pulled me over the railway lines into cover on the far side.
As if ordered, there stood a motorcycle ready to go. So we drove across country in a northwesterly direction to a nearby wood, where Schroder tied me on in a makeshift fashion. Once ready, we were electrified by the sound of tracks of moving tanks. I could see tanks moving slowly toward us like an armada, snapping off the young trees of the little wood like matchsticks. Yet again, as on the previous day, our troops were being surrounded by tanks in a pincer movement and overrolled in a flanking action.
The condition of my unit and the naked fear of death gave me the strength to run. In order to survive, we had to reach the edge of the woods furthest from the tanks and cross the open field beyond. We went up a sloping meadow and had just reached the crest of the hill when we saw the heavy tanks driving out of the little wood. The Diedersdorf-Heinersdorf road, along which the remainder of our supply vehicles, some horse-drawn, were retreating, ran along the far side of the hill in dead ground to the Russians. With the last of my strength, I clambered up on to an open horse-drawn wagon, which took me to the Main Dressing Station in Heinersdorf.[28] The Russian tanks were firing from the edge of the wood, even though their shots could only reach the tops of the trees lining the road. Despite the splinters from bursting shells, nothing serious occurred.
Schroder left me at the Main Dressing Station with a heavy heart. I sat for one or two hours with a lump in my throat. I could hardly think, as the experience kept going around in my mind. Once I had been tended to and bandaged, I was laid on a stretcher outside; outside being an area the size of a football field, filled with with wounded soldiers laid out in rows on stretchers.
Like a flash of lightning from the sky, two Russian fighter-bombers suddenly attacked the Main Dressing Station at low level, mowing gaps in the rows of helpless men with their machine guns. They circled a couple of times repeating their murderous fire before flying off to seek new targets.
I could see how long the transport was taking to evacuate the wounded, there being only four vehicles available, so, with the driver’s consent, I sat on the forward left mudguard of an ambulance with my back to the direction of travel and held fast on to the driving mirror. After a drive lasting over four hours, we were eventually delivered to a reserve hospital in Konigs Wusterhausen.
Against all the rules and some well-meaning advice, I did not stay there, but made my way back by train to Hamburg. So, on 22 April, only three weeks after my departure, I found myself back home again. My sister did not recognise me when she opened the door. My mother came to the door with my father behind her. In his surprise he said: ‘Are you a deserter?’ When I replied: ‘No, I have been wounded.’ he said: ‘In that case, you can come in!’
Tams became a successful businessman in Hamburg after the war.
SEVEN
Marxdorf
ERICH WITTOR
Erich Wittor, squadron commander in the Armoured Reconnaissance Battalion ‘Kurmark’, was in divisional reserve at Falkenhagen, so he and his unit were not committed to action until 18 April 1945, when his experience appears to take over from that of Karl-Hermann Tams.
At battalion headquarters on 18 April 1945, I was given the task of defending the area southwest of Seelow with my squadron, where the enemy had broken through. We immediately drove via Lietzen to Neuentempel. I was checking out the area on the edge of some woods to the west and northwest, and giving instructions to my NCOs, when we came under shell fire. Without any cover whatsoever, without even our steel helmets, we lay defenceless on the open ground, trying to make ourselves as flat as flounders, only able to pray that we would not be hit, the explosions coming right on top of us. Stones, clumps of earth and twigs pattered down all round us. A few minutes seemed like eternity. At last the artillery stopped firing, and the first thing I did was to get out the steel helmets.
Then the squadron was deployed into defensive positions and started digging in. My command post was in an earthen dug-out with a roof of logs that only a direct hit could have penetrated. [29] By evening we were fully prepared for defence and could have held our positions. It became dark, and again artillery fire fell on our positions. Suddenly, from my dug-out I could hear the sound of tanks, and wanted to look out and see what this meant. I had already gone up five or six steps when a shell exploded close by, the blast driving me back down again. I felt numbed, unable to stand or feel anything.
Had something happened to me? I could neither feel nor hear anything. My senses came slowly back to life. A shell splinter as long as a little finger was sticking out of my left hip, jutting out like a needle, so that the medical
