'Halbe 1945"
A desperate battle unfolds outside Berlin - 'Eyewitness Accounts from Hell's Cauldron'
At the end of April 1945 German forces were in disarray, desperately fighting to fend off overwhelming attacks in both the East and West. The stakes appeared higher in the East where the Red Army threw men into battle in a race to get to Berlin, while many Germans knew that they could expect limited respite if they became their prisoners. A ferocious battle developed south east of Berlin where tens of thousands of Germans fought to both check the Soviet advance and also to extricate themselves from the battle and march west in the hope of surrendering to either the British or Americans. Centred around the town of Halbe, a disparate range of different German units were involved, casualties were very high.
The Battle of Halbe, 1945: Eyewitness Accounts from Hell's Cauldron brings together the testimony of various participant both soldiers and civilians:
Grenadier Martin Kleint:
We survivors of Panzergrenadier Division ‘Kurmark’ were armoured infantrymen deployed with the Tigers. After joining SS units in Lietzen, we fought alongside them. That gave us the advantage of being attached to an elite unit where each soldier could trust the other. I was sat relatively safely in my seat on the fourth tank, my machine gun ready. Each tank resembled a colony of ants weaving its way forwards.
At the beginning it all went well. We had no idea which route we were following and yet again we were kept totally in the dark as to where our enemy was positioned and when we would have contact with him. In. fact, we had no clue about anything, but were simply hoping that our steel vehicles would carry us west, allowing us at the very least not to have to continue our trek on foot. Generally, once atop these tanks, we felt powerful and no longer inferior to the Russians...
For a while I was fine, holding on to the turret, but my machine gun then somehow slipped and with our tank brushing against the trees, its muzzle got caught in one of the branches. I lost my balance and had to leap oft'. This wasn’t ideal, what with the tank convoy practically wheel to wheel. The next tank threatened to roll over me - but thankfully both I and my machine gun survived this incident unharmed.
I ran after my tank, stretched my hand clutching the machine gun upwards, steadied myself On the steel hawser fitted to the rear of the tank and clung on to an iron clip installed next to the track to get back on. In the meantime, night had fallen and it had stopped raining - fortunately, as it put an end to us getting soaked through. Antitank shelling, too, had died down and our journey continued without further incident. We reached a paved road, allowing us to advance more swiftly, crossed a train track and read the sign saying ‘Halbe’ . Swerving around the corner, we rolled into the town when suddenly there was a mammoth anti-tank salvo targeting us from all directions. Within minutes three tanks had burst into flames. Crews squeezed themselves out of their narrow hatches completely wrapped in flames. The second tank exploded, my machine gun fell out of my grasp and I sought cover behind a tree.
Then an artillery barrage started. Flares shot into the air, shots whipped through the darkness, the rest of our tanks reversed. Eventually... total silence. All of a sudden someone yelled: ‘Don’t shoot, these are our comrades!’ That was followed by a babble of voices all shouting over each other. Masses of soldiers lurched forwards into the middle of the town. At that moment we came under ferocious attack from the surrounding houses and our group ended up staggering through the town under heavy and accurate fire. Against the glare of burning armoured vehicles, we became a splendid target.
The only shelter came from the trees at the sides of the street. Then, from the other western side of the road we were harassed by Soviet anti-tank guns or tanks. In the panic and chaos we couldn’t distinguish one officer from the next, or make any sense of the orders being given. We had no maps, no plan - we didn’t have the faintest idea of how to break out of this pocket. At long last the voice of a Feldwebel cut through the din: ‘Machine guns and Panzerfausts, to the front!’ A crew member of a tank slowly swinging around flung an ammunition belt in my direction and, dashing past a burning tank, I returned to the protection of the shrubbery.
Now several of us blasted at houses and windows with our machine guns and Panzerfausts. With our fire as cover, others stormed a house on the left side of the road. Dull thuds of our hand-grenades exploding cleared the entry into the building where at long last we found sufficient protection to patch up the injured. Heaps of them were strewn all over the road, wailing, moaning, screaming out in pain. We gathered them up as best we could and carried them into the cellar.
It was an inferno, a ghastly scene of brutality with pools of blood everywhere. The night was pierced by the desperate screams of dying men mixed with the reverberations of countless bombs hailing down and detonating. Aglow with the burning of our own tanks, the town trembled with the rattling of machine guns and shells crashing down. The Russian gunfire was accurate. We were determined to recover one of our comrades who had lost a leg in the shooting and was desperately attempting to claw his way off the street which was all the time being sprayed by enemy fire. We could only watch as one of our own tanks rolled over him literally crushing him to a pulp. An Army medic turned up in the cellar; taking over from us he bandaged the injured and dressed wounds whilst urging us to move on. ‘Get away, find protection, I’ll stay here and hand over the wounded to the Russians.’ Numb, we shook his hand and took the rear exit of the building, which was shielded from the heavy street shelling. Only once we had reached the edge of the forest did we breathe a sigh of relief.
Who would have thought that this was the exact spot where later on a cemetery for the soldiers killed in Halbe would be created - rows upon rows of graves for over 20,000 of our comrades who had fallen in a few days of ferocious fighting in this ‘break-through’ battle.
…
Author Eberhard Baumgart considers why some got away while so many others died:
‘Who might be able now to say for sure what precisely caused the individual soldier or refugee to keep on the move and, as if gone berserk, seek ways and means to break out of the pocket at Halbe? What motivated them furiously and desperately to brave one obstacle after another, risk their lives each time? How to explain that some indeed reached safety with the comrades of the Twelfth Army, defying risk and injury and the shortage of ammunition and fuel, regardless of pain and hunger? ‘Let us frame the question differently: who actually stood a chance of succeeding?
‘To put it bluntly, the answer is those who belonged to regiments, battalions and companies where authority had remained intact and where there was a direct link between order and obedience. That’s where the combative spirit triumphed. ‘Certainly, many of them were clutching at straws - believing the propaganda, slogans and deceptive assurances which were doing the rounds.
...
The resolve displayed by the Ninth Army was also rooted in their first-hand experience of the Red Army’s cruelty. It was this certainty and the relentless barbarity shown in the ensuing slaughter which led to the scream “Run for your lives!” reverberating through the ranks, convincing all those who were cowards and lawless plunderers that there was no point in fighting; their only goal was not to fall into the hands of the Soviets.
The moment those intent on breaking through met Russian resistance, the moment these demoralised gangs who had completely given up faced the slightest obstacle, they withdrew and went to ground. Undecided, unnerved and too scared to attack, they were only waiting for reinforcements who had successfully broken through to tag on to, and fervently hoped that those in front of them would take the hit.
‘Those who embarked on the break-through ended up having to tackle one battle after another. The minute one obstruction had been surmounted, there was another one ahead of them, and then another. That happened day after day, for sixty long kilometres. The columns came under constant barrages of concentrated fire, shells hailing down, blowing up vehicles, men and armaments.
© Eberhard Baumgart 2022, The Battle of Halbe, 1945: Eyewitness Accounts from Hell's Cauldron. Reproduced courtesy of Pen & Sword Publishers Ltd.
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