Siege of Küstrin, 1945

As I recall, for three days we had special rations, even chocolate in round tins intended for airmen or U-boat crews. I was given new trousers, a summer field jacket, two handkerchiefs, and a set of underwear, a mess tin, a spoon and a knife, a gas mask in a canister and a canvas washing kit, but no boots, no overcoat, no cap, no steel helmet, no fork and no toothbrush. I was given a new pay book on 5 April, my 18th birthday, but without a photograph, which had to be dispensed with at this time. I was then given a few days to recover before I was sent to a company at Wriezen in which no one knew each other.[5]

With others that had broken through, I was taken to the Mars-la-Tour Barracks in Fürstenwalde. Next morning, Easter Saturday, we were issued with new clothing, and in the process I met Captain Langenhahn again and followed him into a room where I saw Captain Wüstenhagen. The Küstrin officers had had to give up their weapons and had been placed under guard. They were in a building with double sentries at the entrance. SS-Gruppenführer Reinefarth’s quarters were somewhere else. When going for a walk he was always escorted by two other SS officers. I often talked with Captain Langenhahn and he said among other things that he would ask the Führer for his officers to be released.

That Easter Saturday, 31 March, we celebrated our reunion with beer and schnapps, as originally it had been said that I had been killed. Other officers took part, including Major Fenske and a captain decorated with the Knight’s Cross. During our celebrations an ADC appeared and informed us that all officers from the former Küstrin fortress were to appear in the officers’ mess next morning at 0900 hours.

If I remember correctly, there were 30 or so officers in the Officers’ Mess on Easter Sunday. There the Führer-Order to continue the fight for the Küstrin fortress was read out to us. Then began the individual interrogations.

I was questioned two or three times. We were asked why we had not complied with the Führer-Order and had taken part in the breakout. When I said that in Küstrin basically we could only bring a few weapons against the Russians and in the end had hardly any ammunition left, the interrogating officer said: ‘It would have been better if you had had an assault knife on your back to slit the throat of a Russian and now lay dead in Küstrin rather than sit here before me.’ I then said that I had received an order to break out. I was not accused by him of other things at the further interrogations, but he upset me by saying that the Führer was disappointed with his officer corps. It went similarly with Captain Langenhahn.

After that we continued to remain under arrest while awaiting the decision of the Führer. Then it was at last said that we all had to serve afresh and should volunteer for front-line duty. Captain Langenhahn volunteered immediately and told me: ‘Bölke, you are coming with me!’ I obeyed his order. Captain Langenhahn had several times telephoned people he knew at a central location during the Fürstenwalde process and kept himself informed of what was going on. His idea was to be posted to the Werwolf in Thuringia, as he came from Friedrichroda, where his father was a priest. But that was not allowed and front-line engagement against the Russians was demanded. Captain Wüstenhagen and Major Fenske remained behind. The latter said to me that I should remain in Fürstenwalde and let Captain Langenhahn go ahead on his own, but I could not do that. Meanwhile several days had passed since our breakout from Küstrin.

We reported back to duty with the artillery in the Mars-la-Tour Barracks. We went to our allocated sector of the front between the Märkischer Schweiz and Wreizen via the Anhalter railway station in Berlin. The officer positions in the new unit were already taken, making us surplus to establishment.

When the Russians started their main offensive on 16 April, my last unit neared its end, in which I survived the following experience. I was supervising the change of position of the artillery train. Captain Langenhahn sent a sergeant as a dispatch rider back from the front that I could meantime send on a short journey. Then he was to report back to me and return immediately to Captain Langenhahn. I waited and waited for him. The sergeant turned up hours later. The Feldgendarmerie had arrested him and some others. Those not carrying weapons were shot in the presence of those carrying them. The latter were then sent into action and their previous orders declared invalid. The sergeant had used a suitable opportunity to escape with the motorcycle. Neither of us understood what was going on any more.

On 19 April 1945 I was captured in Reichenow, near Strausberg. We were surrounded and wanted to break out. Captain Langenhahn fell from a shot in the head during this action. His adjutant and I then occupied the servants’ quarters of a manor. Later the adjutant shot himself.

I met Major Hassler in Soviet captivity in the Posen and Dorpat camps. He had been the flak commander in Küstrin. He had not taken part in the breakout but had been captured. He told me that when he was captured, the Russians had already known his name and rank and even his last appointment.[6]

In the final reckoning, relatively few of the Nazi murder-mongers who had operated in Warsaw met with the retribution that they had earned. SS-Gruppenführer Reinefarth, for example, escaped scot-free. After leaving Warsaw, he was appointed commander of the fortress of Küstrin. But in the chaos of the German collapse in March 1945 he was arrested for leaving his post. This incident no doubt helped his later claim to have been an anti-Nazi Resistance fighter. All attempts to have him extradited to Poland were vetoed by the Americans to whom he had surrendered and for whom he acted as an adviser on Soviet military methods. So he was free to pursue a political career in West Germany. He never stood trial, and publicly denied that he had ever been a member of the SS.[8]

On the night of 17/18 April, just as the work on the railway bridges over the Oder and Warthe was finished, the enemy made a strong air attack and destroyed both bridges. Troops of the 29th Railway Brigade and Moskaliov’s bridge-building unit restored both bridges under continuous bombardment within a week, so that they were ready by 25 April. So the first train carrying heavy artillery was able to make its way to Berlin-Lichtenberg simultaneously with the entry of our troops into Berlin at 1800 hours on 25 April.[15]

I arrived at the goods station in an adventurous manner in the brake cab of a goods wagon. It was said that those caught at the Oder were put into a camp, but those that got across remained unmolested, and so it seemed to be the case. A wide wooden bridge had been erected next to the destroyed Warthe Bridge. It led from the crane on the Warthe quay across to the winter harbour quay. The railway crossing at the GAGFA buildings was guarded by a Soviet Army female soldier, who had made herself comfortable under a sunshade. There were still two allotment huts standing left of the railway. The nave of the Catholic church was only slightly damaged, but the tower had been destroyed. The block of flats opposite the church had been reduced to blackened walls. The Wendrichs’ family home on the corner of Wallstrasse was almost undamaged. Voices coming from there led me to believe that someone was living there, but they might have been looters. I got away from there. All the buildings in Wallstrasse were shot-up or burnt out, the ruins partly collapsed. The law courts on the corner of Friedrichstrasse appeared, but were fully destroyed beyond the first floor, the surrounding walls of rough field stones shot through with several metres missing. The adjacent officers’ block, as we called it, is now only a flattened heap of rubble, revealing only the iron central heating boiler. Scraps of paper waved at me, a page from a children’s songbook. Only the yellow compound walls of the Senior School survived the chaos; the janitor’s house and the gymnasium were destroyed, as well as the nearby petrol station with Pritzel’s Garage. Three vast bombs had completely smashed the youth hostel area. The onetime public air raid shelter, later the Front Cinema, had taken a direct hit on its entrance. In an earthen bunker on the Wallkrone I found boxes with thousands of rounds of rifle ammunition–away from here! On the grass in front of the old prison, the area of the ‘Hohen Kavalier’, stood cars and even guns that had become unserviceable and been towed here during the fighting. Next to them was a double-decker Berlin bus that had brought the flak gun crews here in January and had been used as an anti-tank barrier on Kurzen Dammstrasse. There was no petrol for the return journey. Schulstrasse was a picture of horror. The burnt-out ruins had been ploughed through by bombs and shells, and there were the skeletons of vehicles that had been brought to this narrow street thinking that they would be safer here. The masses of debris from the buildings in Kurzen Dammstrasse had piled up into a hill. Bulldozers or other equipment had flattened it out a little so that the ‘street’ was usable again. The war memorial still stood in the middle of the Marktplatz, only lacking the eagle on top. Only a few metal scraps remained of the telephone box on the tram stop island. The words ‘Town Department of Works’ were still visible on the barely 2-metre-high wall of the Ration Office in the Danziger House. Of the town hall there was still a quite high section of the Kommandantenstrasse façade, otherwise only rubble. The skeletons of burnt-out German armoured personnel carriers stood in the street, distinguishable from the piles of rubble. The buildings here fell relatively early, well before the middle of March’s bombs and shells. The ruined landscape was depressing. Bits of walls threatening to collapse warned me not to go any further. I returned to the Neustadt, where I met a woman who was afraid to go back alone to her former home in the Altstadt, so I escorted her. The building lay next to Pritzel’s Garage, naturally only rubble, but the woman identified a few plates lying around as her property. Who knows who took this crockery out of the apartment before it collapsed. On the way back I stumbled upon a tin of jam and picked it up. My companion also found two cans–both without labels, a little eerie, but later the contents proved to be an expensive pea soup. The woman also found a frying pan, but now we could not stay any longer in this desert that was once our home.[17]