The Last Panther - Slaughter of the Reich - The Halbe Kessel 1945

by Wolfgang Faust

  The Last Panther

  Slaughter of the Reich

  The Breakout from the Halbe Kessel

  April-May 1945

  Wolfgang Faust

  Translated from the memoir

  ‘Kesselpanzer’

  (‘Cauldron Panzer’)

  By Wolfgang Faust

  Copyright © The Estate of Wolfgang Faust

  This Edition Published Globally 2015

  Bayern Classic Publications

  Translated and edited by Sprech Media

  All rights are reserved, including resale,

  quotation and excerpt, in part or whole, in all languages.

  This is not a ‘public domain’ text in any part.

  The German terms ‘Koenigstiger’ and ‘Ritterkreuz’ have been translated as

  ‘King Tiger’ and ‘Iron Cross’ respectively. While not exact translations,

  these are the most widely recognised English terms.

  Where appropriate, other German terms are explained in brackets in the text.

  Contents

  Editor’s Introduction

  Entering the Kessel

  Breakout from the Kessel

  The Battle at Halbe

  The Autobahn and the Railroad

  Reaching the Elbe

  Editor’s Introduction

  While the apocalyptic struggle for Berlin in 1945 has been extensively discussed by historians, the massive battle of the Halbe Kessel (which took place at the same time) has received less attention. In late April 1945, the entire German Ninth Army was encircled by Red Army forces about 30 km south of Berlin, as the Soviets raced onward to the capital. The Ninth Army, which comprised a mix of Wehrmacht, Waffen SS and ad-hoc units, totalling some 80,000 men, became trapped in a Kessel (‘cauldron’ or ‘pocket’) around a town named Halbe in the Spree Forest. Among them were a large number of civilian refugees, predominantly women and children, fleeing the Soviet advance.

  For the German civilians, fear of Soviet occupation was huge: partly a result of Nazi propaganda about ‘Red monsters,’ but also stemming from knowledge of Red Army crimes against women during the advance. For the troops, there was the fear that capture by the Soviets would lead to deportation to the Soviet Gulag system, in which survival was believed to be only a remote possibility. For both the soldiers and civilians in the Kessel, therefore, escaping and surrendering to the Americans (and not the encircling Soviets) became a desperate priority.

  The Ninth Army managed to break out of the Kessel through Halbe, amid scenes of carnage which even veteran troops described as the worst they had witnessed. In a series of splinter groups, fighting vicious but confused battles, the breakout troops and civilians fought through Red Army lines to link up with the German Twelfth Army, who had opened a ‘corridor’ to them from the American front in the South West. A few thousand exhausted survivors of the Ninth finally crossed the River Elbe in the closing days of the war, and achieved their goal of surrendering to the Americans; the others were killed or captured by the Soviets.

  Among these escapees of the Halbe Kessel was the young Wolfgang Faust, commander of a Panther tank with the 21st Panzer Division, who had spearheaded some of the breakout attempts. After the war, Faust wrote about his combat in the Kessel, in a memoir entitled ‘Kesselpanzer,’ which remained unpublished in his lifetime. We have now edited and translated ‘Kesselpanzer’ as ‘The Last Panther’ for readers in English, and we hope that the horrific human story of the Halbe Kessel will reach a new audience as a result.

  As with Faust’s only other surviving book (‘Tiger Tracks’), this memoir was written with combat still vivid in Faust’s mind, and is extremely graphic in its depiction of the final chaotic hours of the Third Reich. Some modern readers may be disturbed by Faust’s clinical descriptions of battles, while others will value the remarkable glimpse into the mentality of young German troops who had grown up under the Third Reich. Certainly, ‘The Last Panther’ gives us insights into a part of the war which has seldom been described by those who were present, and never in such ruthless detail.

  While bearing in mind that Faust’s world view was rooted in the German mid-twentieth century, and not the sensitivities of the present day, I strongly believe that Faust’s two books are a remarkable testament to the catastrophe of 1943-45 for both the Soviets and the Germans. I commend both these memoirs to twenty-first century readers who are seeking to understand the Second World War from all its possible perspectives.

  Chris Ziedler

  May 2015

  The Last Panther

  Entering the Kessel

  In the spring of 1945, the war that we had provoked with such ambition was closing on us like a trap. In January of that year, I was the driver of a Tiger 1 panzer in our defence of the River Oder. In February, my battalion was smashed apart and my commander, Helmann, was burned to death in his turret. By April, in the intense reorganisations required by our collapse, I was made commander of my own panzer with the 21st Panzer Division, part of the great German Ninth Army. My panzer was one of the superb Panthers, the pride of the panzer troops. My rank was now Feldwebel (sergeant) and I commanded a crew of teenagers, who looked up to me as if I was a veteran at the age of twenty. Our units tried to hold the Red advance back from Berlin. This was impossible, and we were scattered, while the Reds stormed onward to the capital.

  In the last week of April, the trap was shut. The Red forces encircled our entire Ninth Army, South of Berlin, and shut us into a zone of forests where we could only conceal our vehicles and wait for orders.

  The hiding was a torment. We sat in our panzers and sweated. Inside the Russian encirclement, inside a pine forest, inside a forty-eight tonne Panther. That was when I realised how completely caught I was; crouched on the commander’s chair in the turret, sweat pouring down my back and my heart thumping like a jack hammer. The shadows of Russian bombers were flickering through the pine branches overhead, and the sound of the Russian artillery was loud even through the Panther’s armour plate.

  We were trapped. Locked in by the Russians, who would ship us to Siberia for sure if they captured us. Our only hope was to reach the American lines on the river Elbe to the West – for the Americans were our great hope now. They were once our enemy, the destroyers of our cities, but they were now our salvation if we could only reach them. To be a prisoner of the ‘Amis’ meant hot dogs, cabbage and the Geneva Convention. To be a prisoner of the Reds, we were sure, meant slavery, the Arctic Circle and never seeing your homeland again. But there was an entire Russian army between our battle group and the Americans, between our handful of Panthers, our exhausted Panzergrenadiers and a following of civilian refugees who traipsed behind us, sobbing like a funeral procession.

  ‘How long do we have to wait, Herr Feldwebel?’ my gunner asked me.

  ‘The Capo will be back soon,’ I told him. ‘The Capo will know what to do.’

  The Capo was our name for our platoon leader, our Leutnant. His original unit of six Panthers was now down to three surviving vehicles, and he was attending an emergency officers’ briefing to decide our group’s next move.

  The air in the Panther turret was foul: monoxide exhaust, shell explosive, oil and five big, hunched young men who hadn’t washed for weeks, sweating in the heat. I opened my commander’s cupola. Light flooded in through the hatch: clear, spring light scented with pine needles. Through a gap in the trees, I could see white clouds way up in the blue sky. In a second, though, the sky was crossed with vapour trails and the red-starred wings of the Russian planes, and the reek of explosive bl
ew in on the warm breeze.

  The sheer hopelessness of our situation came home to me then.

  Our three Panthers were parked among the pine trunks in a dense area of forest. To our East, we had a thin screen of troops as a rear guard, but the Russians were probing and testing that line, minute by minute. The sound of their tank engines rose and fell on the breeze, and we could hear the exchanges of fire between our boys and the Russian infantry who rode on the Red panzers. We knew from experience that the Russian commanders didn’t like entering forests, whether from tactical reasons or some Slavic superstition, and their huge Josef Stalin panzers, machines as big as Tiger 1 panzers, could not manoeuvre or traverse their gun barrels between the trees unless they knew the pathways that we knew.

  To the North West and the South East, two Russian army groups had closed on our location in a pincer of armour and mechanized infantry, crushing the few villages outside the woodland. Heiden had been shelled and burned to the ground, its inhabitants dying in the cellars; at Munchehuf, the few remaining civilian women had been raped for hours in the village square. Our reconnaissance men had watched this from the forest, their hearts torn between taking sniper’s shots at the rapists and keeping their location hidden. Schlepzig, a village of dairies and water mills, was blown to pieces by incendiary Katyusha rocket fire, the ditch where its last families took refuge becoming their tomb. Now a solid ring of Russian forces stood around us.

  Here in the forest, where we were hiding like wounded animals, our three Panther panzers and several King Tiger panzers of the Waffen SS Panzer Corps were isolated with a group of some five thousand men. Wehrmacht Volksgrenadiers, Waffen SS elite troops, a company of Fallschirmjager (paratroopers), and huge numbers of the inevitable stragglers: more Wehrmacht men, Panzer troops who had lost their vehicles, rear echelon orderlies, Luftwaffe mechanics, artillery men with no guns, and a dozen other types and classes.

  Among them, in huddles and bunches throughout the trees were groups of civilians. These were women, children and elderly men who had fled their homes in the farms and hamlets as the Reds advanced. With their possessions of a lifetime reduced to bundles, or piles of things in hand carts, they sat in the shadows, staring at the sky above the treetops, or walking up and down like caged creatures in their allotted spaces between the trees and the soldiers.

  Among them, I saw our Capo returning from his briefing, his mottled camouflage uniform well suited to the dappled light, his face fixed in his permanent frown of concentration, his Iron Cross worn proudly at his throat. He walked past the knots of civilians without glancing at them. Only when an aircraft passed very low over the tree canopy, low enough to send pine cones down among us like toy hand grenades, only then did he look up at the sky.

  We all looked up.

  From the tops of the pine trees, small pieces of paper were emerging, floating down and twisting in the breeze. Most became stuck among the branches, but a few slipped between and span slowly down to the forest floor. I grabbed one as it fluttered across the turret, and looked at it. It was a leaflet in neat, printed German:

  Reich Forces!

  Your position is surrounded by our armies, and the end of the war is imminent. Do not waste more lives. Any soldier bringing this leaflet to the Russian lines will be treated well, and all civilians will be given food and shelter.

  We all know that the war is almost over.

  Why fight on for no purpose? Save yourselves!

  After nightfall your safety cannot be guaranteed.

  The leaflet was grabbed from my hand by the Capo, who scanned it, crouching on the Panther’s engine deck, and then laughed.

  ‘Ah, so we’ll be treated well!’ he chuckled, slapping me on the back. ‘What do you think, Faust? Shall we risk it?’

  I mimed indecision, stroking my chin.

  ‘It sounds a very generous offer, sir.’

  ‘I hear those hotels in Siberia are very spacious,’ he laughed grimly, as he gestured to the other tank crews to come over and join us. ‘And there’s as much snow as you can eat every day.’

  ‘I don’t know, Herr Leutnant,’ I said. ‘Russian snow doesn’t agree with me.’

  ‘Nor me, Faust.’ The Capo winked and put the leaflet in his pocket. ‘I’ll use this paper later, by myself, over a hole in the ground.’

  Some of the civilians, though, had grabbed the leaflets and were studying them, debating the proposition in urgent voices. The Capo turned his back on them and gathered the three of our Panther crews, fifteen men in all, at the rear of our Panther, where the big exhaust tubes stood at head height.

  ‘Very well,’ the Capo said, surveying his men. ‘We’re caught like rats in a sack here.’

  The men nodded, knowing this was the truth.

  ‘And there’s one thing in that verdamm leaflet which is true,’ the Capo went on. ‘The war is coming to a close. We have to accept that fact, if we haven’t already. After the war, Germany will still exist, and Germany will need men like us to rebuild, to make it strong again and to look after the people. Germany will need us as much in the next few years as it has in the past six years, I can tell you that. But for us to serve Germany in the future, we must surrender to the Americans. That is our task now.’

  We panzer crews glanced at each other. The war coming to an end? Germany to be occupied, and then rebuilt? These were massive ideas, and difficult to accept – but the Capo kept us focussed on more immediate concerns.

  ‘In this part of the forest, we are just one of many encircled groups of the Ninth Army. All these groups must move West, and assemble in the Spree Forest. We will do so at first light. From the Spree, we will put our panzer forces together, and break out to the West in one coordinated movement, spearheaded by our heaviest available armour. At the same time, the Twelfth Army will fight their way up from the River Elbe to meet us, and they will form a corridor through which our forces can move to the West and the Americans.’

  The crews reacted instinctively, giving the Capo a series of tactical questions.

  Who would lead the final breakout from the Spree Forest?

  The King Tiger panzers of the SS Panzer Corps. They would be the sledgehammer, breaking the path open through the Red lines.

  Who would be the rear guard when we broke out of the Spree Forest?

  The remnants of the 32nd Panzer Division. They would hold off the Reds from the east while the escape corridor was opened.

  Supplies of ammunition?

  No more was available. Each Panther had thirty rounds remaining, half its standard amount.

  Fuel?

  There was no fuel available. Gasoline would have to be found from abandoned vehicles or supplies on the route West.

  The men nodded grimly. We all noticed that the Capo, usually so precise, had not produced a map or diagram of the planned route or the enemy positions. That meant he had no map. Well, so be it.

  ‘Herr Leutnant, what of the civilians?’

  The Capo hesitated for a moment – again, this was unlike him. ‘The civilians? If they can keep up and follow us, let them,’ he said quietly. ‘Otherwise, they will have to remain here.’

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘Yes, all of them. They must struggle on alone. We cannot evacuate them and we cannot help them. If we stay here, both the civilians and the troops are lost. If we break out, at least some troops will be saved for the future of our country.’

  ‘But, Herr Leutnant, the women,’ one of the Panther commanders said. ‘To leave them to the Reds, to be raped, killed?’

  The Capo took a long breath and fixed his eyes on the armour plate of the Panther beside him.

  ‘We cannot help them,’ he repeated. ‘This is a national tragedy. We are seeking to seize some good from this disaster, from the events that have happened. This is our duty now.’

  ‘But, Herr Leutnant – ’

  ‘This is our duty. We will move at first light.’

  In the spring dusk, the sound of fighting from the East was ve
ry clear. It was clear, also, to the civilians camped among us, the young mothers with children who sat pale and hunched over improvised stoves, while their kids scrabbled among the pine needles and earth. It was clear to the old men who stood staring at the stoves, sucking on pieces of stale bread from their haversacks. These civilians asked us no questions – they could tell by the way we were preparing the panzers, checking the engines over and sharing out the ammunition between the crews – they could tell that we were moving out. Up to now, we had moved slowly where possible, enabling the civilians to walk after us with their carts and bundles. Now we would be charging, making a wild dash for the Spree Forest with the other battered remnants of the Ninth Army, with no time to wait for the non-combatants.

  To reconnoitre the immediate route ahead for this breakout at dawn, I went forward with the Capo on foot. We left the encampment and walked, with our MP40s in our hands, through a series of paths between the trees, remembering the route from previous scouting forays. The pines thinned, and we came within sight of the edge of the forest, where the trees gave way to a sandy plain dotted at intervals with craters, lakes and areas of marsh.

  That was the way to the Spree Forest and the West.

  It was an unpromising piece of terrain to advance across: open and soft, full of features which could bog a panzer down or leave it stranded to the Red fire. The plain was strewn in places with wrecked vehicles, trucks, cars and Hanomag half-tracks which had attempted to cross it two days previously as the Russian pincers were closing on our forest hiding places.

  The Capo and I went on foot further than we had been before, along the edge of the trees, where abandoned equipment, weapons and supplies showed where the final troops had tried to flee before the trap closed.

  There were many corpses along this way, too. Many were Wehrmacht troops, hit by shellfire or by incendiaries that left the trees smouldering. The smell of ash, pine sap and human decay hung thick in the air here, untouched by the warm breeze. There were bodies, too, of civilians who had tried to dash across after the troops. One group of women had been pushing a handcart, and their shattered bodies lay among the pine cones, staring up at the branches. The quilts and bowls from their cart lay around them. After that –