Slaughter at Halbe

TWO Breaching the Oder–Neisse Defences

Simultaneously launching their attacks at 0500 hours Moscow time, 0300 hours local time, on 16 April 1945, the two Soviet fronts fought from widely differing base lines, with equally differing techniques, but both using enormous fire-power.

Marshal Zhukov’s main blow was struck from an established bridgehead across a flat valley bottom to reach the bulk of the German defences strung out along the barrier of the 100-foot high Seelow Heights. To give himself an extra two hours of daylight in which to achieve his objectives, Zhukov had mustered 143 searchlights with a view to guiding and lighting the way for the advancing troops while blinding the enemy. Unfortunately, he had not tried out their use in conjuction with an artillery barrage. The result was night-blindness among his own troops, who were then silhouetted to the enemy against a milky mist. Furthermore, the opening barrage directed on the German forward positions was equally counter-productive, for Colonel-General Gotthardt Heinrici, the army group commander and an expert on such defensive operations, had correctly calculated the time of the attack and had had these positions evacuated during the night, so the damage caused by the bombardment only served to hamper the Soviet advance.

Marshal Koniev’s attack, on the other hand, involved an assault river crossing, and his lengthy opening barrage set fire to the woods on the far bank, to the added distress of the defence. With the coming of daylight, he then had aircraft lay a smokescreen for a considerable distance up and down the river in order to conceal the actual crossing points, and by the end of the day his infantry had advanced 13 kilometres on a 29-kilometre front.

In his memoirs, Zhukov provided a detailed description of this first day of battle:

Stalin was not to speak to Zhukov again during the course of the breakthrough battle, an obvious sign of his extreme displeasure with the way things were going. Marshal Zhukov was in deep trouble, and he knew it.

Despite the overall advance that could be claimed, the second day of battle proved as difficult for the 1st Byelorussian Front as the day before, with the casualty toll continuing to mount alarmingly. The rear areas had to be combed for any personnel capable of being redeployed as infantry to fill the gaps in the forward units, and concern at the consequences of the errors made in the planning and execution of this operation grew.[2]

The afternoon of the second day of battle saw the 1st Ukrainian Front’s two tank armies successfully fording the Spree. That evening Koniev reported to GHQ by high frequency telephone from his advance command post, later to become his main headquarters, in Schloss Branitz on the southern outskirts of Cottbus, as he later related:

That same night, 17/18 April, Koniev issued the the following orders:

General Theodor Busse, commanding the German 9th Army, was aware of Koniev’s success to his south. He later wrote of this:

The third day of battle saw an improvement in the progress of Zhukov’s troops, but at heavy cost once more. A German counterattack on the main line of advance, in which considerable casualties had been inflicted on the armour and infantry congesting the one road, pointed to a lack of pre-planning with regard to traffic control and infantry–tank cooperation, which was corrected by the issue of new orders that night. Then, on the fourth day, 9th Army’s last lines of defence opposite Berlin were breached in two places and Zhukov’s troops poured through, three days behind schedule. The Soviets had won, but the cost had been horrific, with an admitted 33,000 dead, but possibly more than twice as many, and 743 tanks and SPGs destroyed, that is one in four of those deployed, or the equivalent of an entire tank army. Moreover, the troops were exhausted.

Zhukov was obliged to revise his plans for the next phase, the taking of Berlin. The 1st Guards Tank Army and the 8th Guards Army would continue as a combined force on the direct line along Reichstrasse 1 to the city under Colonel-General Vassilii I. Chuikov, and there swing south over the Spree and Dahme rivers to encompass the southern suburbs along an arc extending from the Spree to the Havel. The primary objective was set as the Reichstag building, a distinctive, independently standing structure, still easily identifiable amid the chaos at the centre of the ruined city. Fate would determine which formation would actually take the building, for all the formations surrounding the city, except the 47th Army guarding the western flank, would be competing under front supervision. Zhukov was aware that Stalin had given his rival Koniev permission to send his tank armies towards Berlin on the night of 17 April, but still expected to have the city to himself, and part of Chuikov’s task was to ensure this.[6]

On the German side, 9th Army had just been shattered for the second time in three months, all the reserves had been burnt up, some 12,000 men had been killed in the four days of fighting, and there was now no chance of re-establishing any force capable of standing up to the Soviet onslaught. LVI Panzer Corps was being driven back on Berlin in the centre, and was trying to make for the bridges across the Spree in the south-eastern corner of the city and so rejoin the bulk of the parent 9th Army, while in the north CI Corps was withdrawing northwards behind the temporary safety of the Finow Canal.

Hitler’s insistence that 9th Army’s right wing hold on to the Oder line had prevented any flexibility in the handling of the formations facing the Soviet attack. The bulk of 9th Army was now isolated south of the main thrust on Berlin and physically incapable of preventing the Soviet advance. General Busse summarized this last day in his postwar study:

Clearly none of the German formation commanders involved had any intention of taking the battle into Berlin and defending the city by street fighting. They had fought the decisive battle and lost; now they were primarily concerned with preserving their remaining forces by maintaining a fighting front against the Soviets. However, a proper appreciation of the situation leading to an independent decision on a course of action was hampered by the current command structure and the limitations imposed on them by the system. But the critical point had been reached where the individual commanders had to accept that the regime was finished and that there was no longer any point in trying to continue the struggle, whatever orders might still come from above. The basic problem here was one of conscience in view of the seriousness with which the soldier’s oath of allegiance was generally regarded, in this case the oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler as head of state. Consequently, subsequent actions by many German commanders were to be dogged by individual struggles of conscience, bringing delays at considerable expense to their commands.

Meanwhile Koniev’s tank armies, backed by three-quarters of Colonel-General S. A. Krasovsky’s 2nd Air Army’s aircraft, continued to make steady progress northward, although not fast enough to satisfy Koniev who was still hoping to get into Berlin ahead of Zhukov. Apart from a few local Volkssturm units, there were no troops around to oppose the Soviets in this area and yet Colonel-General P.S. Rybalko’s 3rd Guards Tank Army, concerned about the German forces on its right flank, made only about thirty kilometres on the 19th, in comparison with the fifty kilometres made by Colonel-General D.D. Lelyushenko’s 4th Guards Tank Army. Koniev sent Colonel-General N.P. Pukhov’s 13th Army to follow them up and secure their flanks and lines of communication.[8]

A member of the 4th Guards Tank Army commented:

This advance by Koniev’s forces had isolated V Corps from the remainder of 4th Panzer Army, so that on the evening of 19 April it was transferred to General Busse’s command. Busse immediately ordered it to leave only a light screen in its positions along the Neisse and to cover his rear with a line of defence from north of Lübben to Halbe. He also took its 21st Panzer Division under his direct command, sending it to establish a line of defence along the chain of lakes between Teupitz and Königs Wusterhausen. However, this division had been seriously fragmented in the previous fighting, and the headquarters element under Lieutenant-General Werner Marcks brought little with it apart from Major Brand’s 21st Armoured Reconnaissance Battalion, Artillery Regiment Tannenberger and some elements of the 192nd Panzergrenadier Regiment. Battlegroup von Luck, consisting of Colonel von Luck’s 125th Panzergrenadier Regiment and the remaining Panthers of the 22nd Panzer Regiment, was still engaged in the southern part of V Corps’ area.[10]

Hitler’s 56th birthday, 20 April 1945, was the day he belatedly decided to make Army Group Weichsel responsible for the defence of the capital. Heinrici immediately assigned the task to 9th Army, but General Busse argued the point and the order was rescinded, the Berlin Defence Area remaining directly under Army Group Headquarters. With the remains of 9th Army coiling back on themselves in the south, the only resource now available was LVI Panzer Corps, already fully stretched and in imminent danger of losing contact with the formations on either side. In Heinrici’s opinion, Hitler’s instructions for 9th Army to remain on the Oder had condemned it to extinction and he therefore decided to concentrate upon saving 3rd Panzer Army north of Berlin from a similar fate, in essence leaving the problem of Berlin to LVI Panzer Corps.[11]

As a means of compensating for the depletion of the Berlin garrison, the Friedrich Ludwig Jahn Infantry Division of Reichsarbeitsdienst (RAD – Labour Service) personnel from General Walter Wenck’s 12th Army was reassigned to the Berlin Defence Area but no one in Berlin seemed to know where the division was, or what it consisted of, and such was the state of communications that despatch riders had to be sent out to find it. Eventually the divisional headquarters was traced to a village north of Trebbin and Lieutenant-General Helmuth Reymann, commander of the Berlin Defence Area, set out to visit it.[12]

Koniev’s forces were now approaching rapidly from the south against negligible opposition.[13] A column of 360 tanks and 700 other vehicles was reported moving north up the autobahn past Lübben.[14] Colonel-General Rybalko remained very concerned about his 3rd Guards Tank Army’s vulnerability to flank attack, and kept dropping off road-blocks to seal off the Spreewald pocket, much to the annoyance of Koniev, who sent him the following signal:

With Koniev’s exhortations urging it on, 3rd Guards Tank Army succeeded in covering sixty kilometres on 20 April, taking Baruth during the course of the afternoon and almost reaching Zossen before disaster struck.[16] The leading brigade of 6th Guards Tank Corps ran out of fuel and was then destroyed piecemeal by Panzerfausts.[17]

This occurred close to the Maybach bunker complex, where the bulk of the OKW and OKH staff had anxiously been awaiting permission to evacuate all day. The camp guard company, together with six to eight tanks from the nearby Wünsdorf training establishment, had been sent to block the crossroads at Luckau. By 0600 hours that morning, however, they were already reporting being bypassed by Soviet armour, and by nightfall the twenty survivors of the 250-strong unit were back in Zossen, apparently unaware of the cause of the delay in the Soviet advance. This, presumably, had been due to the intervention of local Volkssturm or Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth) units.[18]

However, Koniev claimed that the Germans had pitted what he described as a tank training battalion, a brigade of assault guns, three labour and two construction regiments, two flying schools and units of the Friedrich Ludwig Jahn Division against his advance on Berlin.[19] The defence in this area is presumed to have been a battlegroup commanded by a Colonel Oertel, to which the 1st Grenadier Regiment of the Friedrich Ludwig Jahn Division had been sent by truck after the collapse on the Oder.[20] The tank training battalion he mentions was presumably an ad hoc unit raised by the tank school at Wünsdorf, while the brigade of assault guns would have been a battalion of SPGs, a deliberate misnomer used by the Germans at this stage of the war.

Permission was then received from the Führerbunker for the OKW and OKH staff to evacuate, but the staff packed up in such haste that there was no time to destroy any of the documents and equipment left behind, and the Soviets were able to take over these items intact next day. The convoy set off for Wannsee, a south-western suburb of Berlin, at about 1500 hours and immediately came under air attack, losing two of its vehicles. From Wannsee the OKW element was redirected to Krampnitz, north of Potsdam, and the OKH to the Luftwaffe Academy at Gatow. General Krebs moved permanently into the Führerbunker with General Wilhelm Burgdorf, Hitler’s chief adjutant and head of the Army Personnel Office.[21]

Hans Lehmann witnessed the arrival of 3rd Guards Tank Army in Baruth on 21 April:

On the left flank 5th Guards Mechanized Corps of 4th Guards Tank Army came up against some resistance in the Jüterbog–Luckenwalde area but was still able to cover forty-five kilometres in daylight, and one group pushed on through the night for a further thirty-five kilometres, until it reached the southern obstacle belt of the Berlin Defence Area.[24]

Jüterbog was an old garrison town with training areas, rifle ranges, schools of artillery and signals, an ammunition factory and depots, two airfields at Jüterbog Damm and Altes Lager, and military hospitals. The airfields had already been attacked by Soviet aircraft on 18 and 19 April, as had the Fuchsberg barracks complex and the railway workshops on 19 April. Next to the large Werk A ammunition factory was a camp for some 1,600 American, British and Norwegian prisoners of war, and another large camp for forced labourers. Guards Lieutenant Feodor Ivanovitch Shartshinski of the 51st Guards Tank Regiment was to be awarded a posthumous ‘Hero of the Soviet Union’ decoration after he was shot by the camp guards while attempting to liberate the labour camp with eight other scouts on 22 April.[25]

It seems that, while 11th Guards Mechanized Brigade was left to subdue the town, 13th Guards Mechanized Brigade was ordered to push on northwards to Luckenwalde, while the orders given to 10th Guards Mechanized Brigade on 20 April read:

That evening, 20 April, General Reymann returned to Berlin with the news that the Friedrich Ludwig Jahn Division, while forming up on the parade ground at the Wehrmacht’s main ammunition depot at Jüterbog that day, had been surprised and scattered by Soviet tanks. Some of the men from the two infantry regiments had been saved but nearly all the artillery had been lost and the divisional commander, Colonel Klein, had been captured.

Shortly afterward General Krebs telephoned instructions to send this division together with the Wünsdorf Tank Unit to drive back the Soviet spearheads approaching Berlin from the south. These Führerbunker orders, committing the remains of two badly shattered regiments and a handful of tanks that had already been destroyed to repulse two tank armies, Reymann could only ignore, and he ordered the survivors back to Potsdam.[27]

Meanwhile General Busse was trying to cover the exposed northern flank of his truncated 9th Army as best he could. A Soviet thrust on Fürstenwalde threatened the rear of XI SS Panzer Corps, whose 169th and 712th Infantry Divisions, together with the Frankfurt Garrison, were still trying to hold on to their forward positions east of the Spree. Busse only had the remains of the Kurmark and Nederland SS Panzergrenadier Divisions to cover this exposed sector and to counter the Soviet thrusts along his front. Inevitably the infantry divisions began to reel back to the south-west as the situation rapidly deteriorated, while the Panzergrenadier divisions fought to keep the escape routes open over the Spree east of Fürstenwalde. In order to cover the Spree west of this point, part of the 32nd SS Volunteer Grenadier Division 30. Januar was pulled out of the line to establish a screen from Fürstenwalde to the Müggelsee (lake) south of the Oder–Spree Canal – Spree River barrier.[28]

Frieda Schulze, a farmer’s wife, described what it was like in one of the villages in the path of the fighting: