Berlin: The Downfall 1945

22. Fighting in the Forest

‘Who would ever have thought,’ noted a battalion commander of the Scharnhorst Division as they advanced to Beelitz, ‘that it would be just a day’s march from the Western Front to the Eastern Front! It says everything about our situation.’

General Wenck’s XX Corps had started its attack eastwards on 24 April to break through to meet the Ninth Army encircled in the forests beyond Konev’s supply lines. That evening, the Theodor KörnerDivision of Reich Labour Service youths attacked General Yermakov’s 5th Guards Mechanized Corps near Treuenbrietzen. On the next day, the Scharnhorst Division approached Beelitz. They had no idea of what lay ahead as they moved through a mixture of thick young plantations and mature, well-spaced pine forest. The operation, observed the battalion commander, ‘had the character of an armed reconnaissance’. A few kilometres before Beelitz, they came upon the hospital complex at Heilstätten.

The nurses and patients, who had been looted very thoroughly the day before by Soviet troops and liberated slave labourers, heard artillery. Nobody knew where this battle was coming from. A shell hit one of the blocks. The children were taken down into the cellars. The nurses asked each other whether this could be the Americans arriving. Later, they suddenly saw German troops arriving from the west in skirmishing formation, dashing forwards from tree to tree. Two of the nurses ran outside towards them, screaming, ‘Blast the Russians away!’ As the battle intensified, the director of the hospital, Dr Potschka, decided to make contact with the Americans on the Elbe. The Swiss clearly could not help them.

The battle for Beelitz continued for several days. In the course of the fighting and the earlier outrages, seventy-six civilians were killed, including fifteen children. ‘It was fought with great bitterness,’ the battalion commander of the Scharnhorst wrote, ‘and no prisoners were taken.’ He and his men were appalled when the Soviets captured a house in which all their wounded comrades were lying in the cellar. The young soldiers — some of them were so young that civilians in Beelitz referred to them as ‘Kindersoldaten’ — suffered ‘tank fright’ on first encountering T-34 and Stalin tanks. But within a couple of days confidence returned when four Stalin tanks were knocked out with panzerfausts. Peter Rettich, the battalion commander, hailed his young soldiers’ ‘fantastic acts of bravery’ and their ‘dedication’ and then added that it was ‘a crying shame and a crime to throw such boys into this all-destructive hell’.

On 28 April, the 3,000 wounded and sick children were loaded by men of the Ulrich von Hutten Division on to a shuttle of goods trains which took them slowly off towards Barby. There the Kinderklinik was re-established and the Americans accepted the wounded as prisoners of war. Wenck, however, had set the Twelfth Army more important missions. One was the drive up towards Potsdam with the bulk of the Hutten Division to open up an escape corridor. The other was to help the Ninth Army save itself.

The German troops in the huge Spree forest south-east of Berlin represented an unwieldy mixture of mangled divisions and terrified civilians fleeing the Red Army. The 80,000 men had come together from different directions and different armies. The bulk were from General Busse’s Ninth Army — XI SS Panzer Corps on the Oderbruch and V SS Mountain Corps south of Frankfurt. The Frankfurt garrison, as Busse had been hoping, also managed to escape to join them. They were joined from the south by V Corps, which had formed the northern flank of the Fourth Panzer Army until cut off and forced back by Konev’s drive on Berlin.[4]

Busse, having consulted with General Wenck, was determined to break out due westwards through the tall pine forests south of Berlin. He would join up with the Twelfth Army, and both would withdraw to the Elbe. Busse’s main problem was that his rearguard was tied down in constant battles with Zhukov’s forces, and he warned Wenck that his army was ‘pushing to the west like a caterpillar’. Neither he nor Wenck intended to waste any more lives by following Hitler’s increasingly hysterical orders to attack up towards Berlin. Busse, shortly after midnight on 25 April, had been given authority ‘to decide for himself on the best direction of attack’. From then on, he adopted a Nelsonian tactic of refusing to acknowledge most signals, although in many cases radio communications genuinely broke down.

His men and the civilians who had sought refuge with them had virtually no food left. Vehicles were kept moving until they ran out of fuel or broke down and then they were destroyed or cannibalized for spare parts. He did, however, have thirty-one tanks left — half a dozen Panthers from the Kurmark, the remains of General Hans von Luck’s 21st Panzer Division, and around ten King Tigers from the 502nd SS Heavy Panzer Battalion. These he hoped to use as his spearhead to break through the rear of Konev’s armies attacking Berlin. Their fuel tanks were topped up by siphoning from trucks abandoned by the side of the road. His remaining artillery would fire an opening barrage with their last shells, then blow up their guns.

Busse’s men were encircled in the pattern of lakes and forest southwest of Fürstenwalde by troops from both the 1st Belorussian Front and Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front. On the afternoon of 25 April, Zhukov sent his forces into the attack from the north and east. They included the 3rd Army, the 2nd Guards Cavalry Corps, which was well adapted to forest fighting, the 33rd Army and the 69th Army.

Konev had realized, after studying the map, that the Germans had little choice for their breakout. They would have to cross the Berlin-Dresden autobahn south of the series of lakes starting at Teupitz. Konev reacted rapidly, albeit rather late in the day. On 25 April, Gordov’s 3rd Guards Army was rushed into positions close to the Berlin-Dresden autobahn ‘to block all the forest roads leading from east to west’. They chopped down tall pine trees to form tank barriers. But Gordov did not manage to occupy the southern part of his sector. And although the 28th Army reinforced the area east of Baruth as ordered, a slight gap remained between the two armies.

On the morning of 26 April, Busse’s vanguard, advancing through Halbe, happened to find the weak point between the two armies. They crossed the autobahn and reached the Baruth-Zossen road, which was the supply line to Rybalko in Berlin. General Luchinsky, to avert the danger, even had to send the 50th and 96th Guards Rifle Divisions into a counter-attack ‘without information about the situation’. The fighting was chaotic, but heavy bombing and strafing from the 2nd Air Army and relentless counter-attacks on the ground forced many of the Germans back across the autobahn into the Halbe forest. The panzer crews had found that their tracks did not grip on the sandy soil of the pine forest and they were forced to avoid the forest roads because of the constant air attacks.

The group that managed to cross both the autobahn and the Baruth-Zossen road was spotted by a Luftwaffe aircraft. This was reported to Army Group Vistula and to General Jodl. Hitler was furious when he heard that they were heading westwards, but he still could not believe that Busse would dare to disobey him. A signal was sent that night via Jodl. ‘The Führer has ordered that concentric attacks of Ninth and Twelfth Armies must not only serve to save the Ninth Army but principally to save Berlin.’ Further signals were more explicit: ‘The Führer in Berlin expects that the armies will do their duty. History and the German people will despise every man who in these circumstances does not give his utmost to save the situation and the Führer.’ Hitler’s one-way concept of loyalty was perfectly revealed. The signal was repeated several times that night and the following day. There was no reply from the forest.

During that night and the next day, 27 April, the Germans renewed their attack along two axes: in the south from Halbe through towards Baruth, and in the north from Teupitz. In the north, several thousand Germans supported by tanks drove a wedge into the 54th Guards Rifle Division, captured Zesch am See and surrounded part of the 160th Rifle Regiment. In the south, the thrust towards Baruth encircled the 291st Guards Rifle Regiment under Lieutenant Colonel Andryushchenko in Radeland, where they seized attics and basements and fought until rescued by the 150th Guards Rifle Regiment from Baruth. Once again, the Germans ‘suffered very heavy losses’.

This is the tidy version of events — the staff officer’s summary, trying to produce order out of chaos. But within the forest, in and around Halbe especially, the reality of the battle was appalling, mainly due to Soviet artillery and air bombardment.

‘If the first attempts to break out through the encirclement succeeded, they were immediately destroyed by Russian aircraft and artillery,’ Major Diehl, the commander of the 90th Regiment in the 35th SS Police Grenadier Division, told his interrogators when captured. ‘The losses were huge. One literally could not raise one’s head and I was absolutely unable to conduct the battle. All I could do was lie under a tank with my adjutant and look at the map.’

Men with chest and stomach wounds lay bleeding to death. Most of the injuries came from wood splinters, as in an eighteenth-century battle at sea. The Soviet tank crews and artillery deliberately aimed to explode their shells high in the trees. For those below there was little protection. Digging trenches in the sandy soil filled with tree roots was an impossible task, even for those who still had spades. Some men in their desperation for shelter tried to dig frantically with their helmets or rifle butts, but they could achieve little more than a shallow shell-scrape, which was no protection from the splinters.

Air and artillery bombardments in such conditions produced a panic even among experienced soldiers. When Soviet reconnaissance or ground attack aircraft appeared overhead, those German soldiers riding on the vehicle began firing at them wildly with sub-machine guns and rifles. Any wounded or exhausted men on foot who collapsed in the path of armoured vehicles or trucks were simply run over by wheels or crushed by tank tracks.

As the battle continued in that last week of April, there were few front lines in the expanse of forest. Skirmishes were deadly, with a tank suddenly surprising an enemy in enfilade down a fire-break or ride. A Tiger and a Panther, followed by half-tracks, all covered with exhausted soldiers clinging on to the outside, were fired at by a Soviet tank. Everyone tried to fire back at once in the confusion. The infantrymen on the outsides of the tanks had to jump as the turret traversed. But the Soviet tank was faster. Its next shell hit one of the half-tracks, which happened to be loaded with cans of spare fuel. It exploded in a ball of flame, setting light to the forest around.

Constant smoke from burning pine trees drifted through the forest. Although Soviet commanders denied it, their artillery and aviation regiments certainly seemed to be using phosphorous or other incendiary projectiles. Horses towing supply carts or limbers and guns were terrified and bolted easily. The smoke also greatly reduced visibility in the already gloomy light amid the tall, straight trunks like cathedral columns. There was a constant noise of men calling to each other, hoping to make contact with their group. Despite all the attempts to issue orders to recognizable formations, the different army corps had mingled into an incoherent mass, with Wehrmacht and SS trudging uneasily alongside each other. Mutual suspicion had greatly increased. The SS claimed that army officers refused to pick up their wounded, but there was little sign of SS officers doing anything for Wehrmacht soldiers, except crush them under their tracks if they were in the way. The army’s resentment of the SS as an alien organization rose very close to the surface. There were apparently also SS women, armed and in black uniforms, riding on the Tiger tanks.

After the first breakout failed, groups tried to slip through in different directions. One detachment came across a Soviet artillery position which had been stormed by half-tracks the day before. They crossed the autobahn and found dead Soviet soldiers still in their foxholes. Like the other groups, they continued on through the forests towards the rendezvous round Kummersdorf, which the first breakthrough group had almost reached. After the autobahn, the most dangerous part was crossing the Baruth-Zossen road, defended by another line of Soviet rifle divisions and artillery.

On the night of 28 April, another determined attempt at a mass breakout from the Halbe area was made. In desperate fighting, the Germans managed to smash the line held by the 50th Guards Rifle Division. ‘For this they paid in heavy losses,’ wrote General Luchinsky. Konev, determined that the rest should be crushed, reinforced the flanks. Trees were felled across tracks leading westwards. Each rifle division set up lines of anti-tank guns hidden behind fire-breaks or tracks, as if they were engaged in a gigantic boar shoot. Rifle regiments, supported by small tank detachments, attacked into the forest east of the autobahn.

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 Kübelwagen 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 Jürgs, 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. Jürgs 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 Mückendorf, 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, ‘Woina kaputt. Domoi. Woina kaputt!’ — ‘The war’s over. Time to go home. The war’s over!’ Meanwhile, the political department of the 1st Ukrainian Front stiffened its men’s determination with the message, ‘The remains of the destroyed German hordes are wandering in the forests like wild beasts and will try to reach Berlin at any cost. But they won’t pass.’ Most of them did not. Close to 30,000 men lie buried in the cemetery at Halbe and every year scores more bodies are discovered out in the forest. In June 1999, the Ninth Army’s Enigma machine was also found in a shallow grave beside the autobahn. Nobody knows for sure how many refugees died with the soldiers, but it could have been as many as 10,000. At least 20,000 Red Army soldiers died too. Most are buried in a cemetery on the Baruth-Zossen road, but scores of their bodies too are still being found deep in the woods.

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 Führer 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. The Third Reich, in its death throes, revealed its frenzied rage against both common sense and common humanity.

Heinrici, having given Manteuffel permission to withdraw, knew that it would not be long before he heard from the two chief ‘gravediggers of the German army’. Field Marshal Keitel, on discovering what had happened, telephoned Heinrici on 29 April, accusing him of ‘disobedience and unsoldierly weakness’. He told him that he was relieved of his command forthwith. Keitel tried to appoint General von Manteuffel as Heinrici’s successor, but he refused. General Jodl rang not long afterwards. In his coldest manner, he also accused Heinrici of cowardice and weak, incompetent leadership. Heinrici was ordered to report to OKW’s new headquarters. His aides, fearing that he would be executed or forced to commit suicide like Rommel, begged him to spin out his journey. He followed their advice and the end of the war saved him.