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

by Wolfgang Faust

  We approached one of these, accelerating and unable to halt or give assistance to the wounded. Our only hope of getting through was to keep moving and minimise our time in the open. As we passed the first trailer, it was rocked by a high-explosive shell which ripped the sides off, and threw the wounded men still on their stretchers across the ground. There was no chance to swerve: our Panther rolled over them without even a bump, crushing their stricken bodies where they lay. Our driver groaned and cursed as this happened, but there was no way to avoid the massacre. The other trailers that we passed were filled with the terrified faces of wounded men, huddling together as the shells exploded around them, knowing that death could strike at any moment. Then we were past these doomed men, and went charging down the slope, rearing and bouncing between the shell bursts, towards the village.

  In front of us, I saw the two King Tigers moving like steamrollers down the incline, crushing flat the few vehicles that lay in their paths. One Tiger completely crushed an empty staff car, and the gasoline left in it exploded in a puff of flames under the Tiger’s treads. The other Tiger dipped down into a reed bed, and came up streaming with mud and water, its momentum such that even the marshy ground could not hold it back. That Tiger was hit by a shell which exploded on its flank, and its armoured track guards were blown away in a star burst of fire, but the panzer did not slow for a second.

  As we raced behind the King Tigers, I checked around for our other two Panthers. The Capo, distinguished by his commander’s extended radio aerial, was next to us, but our third Panther was lagging behind, travelling more slowly. It had an engine problem, perhaps, or had taken a shell strike on the running gear. It slowed yet further, falling behind, and I had to turn my attention to the front again.

  We were approaching the village, and now we could see Russian PAK (anti-tank) guns emplaced in earth embankments around the meadows at the edge. A PAK shell hit us on the front plate with a crash that jarred my teeth, and then another smashed into our turret close to my head, feeling like a blow to the temple. We rolled on, though, and I saw repeated PAK rounds deflecting off the colossal armour of the Tigers in front, tracer rounds spiralling off the hull and turret as the panzers raced through the tornados of shrapnel. One King Tiger was hit by high explosive, but the round burst against the turret and did not damage the tracks.

  All of our panzers were swaying, rising and falling now as we lurched over the uneven ground – and this wild movement made it harder, of course, for the Red gunners to target any specific place on our structures. We were travelling at thirty kilometres per hour, bucking and swerving almost out of control, and in a few seconds the enemy PAK emplacements loomed up directly in front of us.

  There was no time to slow down - and no need to do so. The King Tigers crashed into the emplacements first, smashing the earth walls aside in a cloud of debris. I saw an entire Red PAK crew turn and flee, but first their gun was chewed to pieces by the Tiger’s tracks, and then the men themselves were scythed down – first by machine gun fire from the panzer, and the survivors by being trampled under the churning tracks themselves. I saw the Tiger’s track-work run bright red with flesh, and then we ourselves were colliding with a PAK position, and wreaking the same destruction.

  The entire barrel and wheels of a PAK gun rose up in front of us as we broke open its emplacement, the gun revolving in the air as it was thrown to one side by the momentum of our tonnage. The Red gunners, too, were smashed apart, with boots and helmets spinning around our turret as our driver slewed the machine to one side to hit another emplacement. This one caused us to rear up into the air, and I believe we were airborne for a short while – and then our entire weight came hurtling down on the gun underneath us. I heard and felt the Red ammunition detonate under us, but by then we were beyond the emplacement and careering towards the houses of the village.

  I could see Red troops running from us through the one main street, and others firing on us with small arms or hurling grenades. I opted to use some precious ammunition, and ordered my gunner to clear the settlement. Two rounds of our high explosive sent the remaining Reds scrambling away, and the firing against us ground to a halt.

  We came to rest with a mighty thump, up against the earth wall of a farmer’s animal enclosure, where many dead cattle lay with their legs stiffened upward. To our right, the two King Tigers were firing intermittently into the village, and beside me the Capo’s Panther advanced into the main street, firing down it towards the square that we could see at the far end.

  I looked back at the slope behind us. Our third comrade Panther was stranded on the incline, with black smoke drifting from its engine. It was shuddering and making jerking movements as it tried to advance, but the running gear was evidently seized. Behind it, a mass of German infantry were already surging, not in disciplined ranks but in a mob of field-grey, blue and camouflage uniforms, running each man for himself down the slope towards us, through the smoke of the bombardment still swirling in the air. The sun was rising behind them in the East, and this lit the smouldering trees of the pine forest in a lurid glow, showing up the folds of the ground and the debris the men were scrambling over.

  This frantic horde managed to cover a hundred metres or so, before the Katyusha rockets came down on them again. In the time we had charged down the hill, the Soviet rocket gunners had clearly recalibrated their launchers onto the slope – and now the high-explosive and incendiary warheads came screaming in again, directly into the mass of charging infantry.

  The stranded Panther was hit first, even as the horde of infantry swarmed past it. With a colossal impact, the turret of the panzer was blown completely off the hull, flinging the panzer crew out into the charging mass of infantry, where they disappeared under the hundreds of boots. A second shell exploded among the running figures, and then another – until I turned my eyes away from the carnage and the whirling, fragmented bodies.

  In front of us, I could make out through the dusty periscope glass the pasture before the village, the shattered houses and the rear plate of the Capo’s Panther as he traversed his turret left and right in the middle of the main street, probing for resistance. I saw a group of Red soldiers slip out of a doorway on his right, clutching small packages which could only be anti-panzer mines. My gunner saw them too, and fired a burst of MG from the co-axial gun. The Reds sprawled on the cobbles, their bodies rolling over as the bullets propelled them across the stones. On my left, the two massive King Tigers rumbled up into the edges of the village, standing against the picturesque, timbered buildings in stark outline. They progressed slowly around the edge of the settlement, using an unsurfaced road that ran beside the village through its water meadows.

  Even as my Panther began to enter the village, the German infantry were on our heels. Hundreds of our ragged, emaciated comrades began to pour off the slopes and run, walk or hobble after the King Tigers, while some – those best-armed and seemingly most alert – cautiously came in behind us to the village centre, fanning out along the frontages and sweeping the gardens for concealed enemy troops.

  In the main square, as the Capo’s Panther and mine halted with our eyes on a row of Russian trucks that could be exploited for fuel, a handful of Red prisoners were dragged together – men who had been hiding in cellars or gardens, disarmed and reluctant to fight. We set them to work immediately, once we had ascertained that the trucks used gasoline and not diesel. The prisoners were put to work, using our hand pumps to siphon off the precious fuel from their trucks and transfer it to the two surviving Panthers.

  Several shells fell among the houses, blowing the roofs off and causing gable walls to collapse, but the bombardment seemed to be slackening in intensity – the Russian artillery perhaps not realising that their men were no longer in control of the village. In this comparative lull, many German civilians emerged and began to gather around the Panthers, begging us to take them with us, away from the encircling Reds.

  ‘Our way forward is through the Spree Forest to the Wes
t,’ the Capo said to them. ‘That is a dangerous journey, and we cannot slow down for you.’

  ‘Come inside here and see something,’ one old man said to us. ‘Come.’

  While the Red prisoners were still pumping the fuel, the old man took the Capo and myself into the largest building on the square – an ancient council chamber surmounted by an ornate weather vane. It took time for my eyes to adjust to the dim light inside, which was filtered through coloured glass windows. In this old council hall, on the wood floorboards polished by generations of villagers’ feet, there was a row of young women, naked on the floor. Their bodies glowed a waxy colour in the faint light, among the wounds and splashes of blood that covered their bodies. From a ceiling beam, two men were hanging from nooses, their necks broken, their open eyes staring down at the corpses of –

  ‘Their daughters,’ the man explained. ‘They were made to watch this, and then they were hanged.’

  Back outside, the Capo allowed the civilians to climb onto the panzers. Then he took his Walther pistol and, when the Red soldiers had finished pumping the fuel, he took them to one side and shot them dead, in the back of the neck, one after the other against the council chamber wall.

  A circle of villagers, troops and us panzer crews watched this – and then we moved out of the settlement, towards the woodland beyond where we could see the King Tigers halted under the first trees of the Spree Forest, our objective. A throng of several hundred civilians followed our Panthers on foot into the woods. We went past the King Tigers, and now it was we who led the way. The civilians proved helpful – one woman perched on my turret, with a carbine slung over her shoulder, and pointed out to me the broadest tracks to take to enable us to reach the dense, central part of the forest most quickly.

  As we moved out of sight of the village, I heard the scream of aero engines.

  A trio of Red aircraft, the type known as the Sturmovik, was racing over the village, strafing with cannon. I saw the remaining red-tiled roofs of the houses fracture in sparks, until, as we rounded a corner in the track and moved finally away, the whole village was enveloped in a whirlwind of smoke and ash.

  The Russians had realised that we had broken through. But what happened to Markhof was behind us now, and we had to forget it. We were where we aimed to be, in the Spree Forest itself, and now we had to move across it and break out to the West.

  ‘Well, we are in the Kessel,’ the Capo said to me on the radio from his Panther. ‘We are Kessel panzers now.’

  A Kessel: a cauldron, a boiling pot. A Kessel is a pocket of troops who are surrounded, but won’t give up or surrender. A Kessel is a living, breathing stew, of troops and civilians, of panzers, vehicles, horses and carts. We were part of the Kessel now.

  *

  Breakout from the Kessel

  To say that we were not alone in the Kessel would be a terrible understatement. The Kessel consisted of the entire Spree Forest, East of a small town called Halbe, which was a place that I had never heard of before, but would never be able to forget. The Spree contained ancient oak, pine and birch groves which stretched perhaps thirty kilometres from East to West, punctuated by small lakes, heaths and firebreak channels where no trees grew. This whole area was alive with people – with tens of thousands of people, we began to realise, as we penetrated deeper into the woods, heading West.

  The forest tracks – bare earth roads meant for forestry wagons, not an army – were full of people walking, limping, driving and riding to the West. Some were soldiers, of all ranks, insignia and uniforms, including Wehrmacht, Waffen SS and Volkssturm (civilian defence force) troops, all mingled together. The Volkssturm men were dressed in civilian clothes, with Panzerfausts (single-shot bazookas) and the crude sub machine guns manufactured specifically for their use. Some of the troops were wounded, and they walked on crutches or they travelled by climbing onto any vehicle that would accept them – whether a panzer, truck or horse cart. Men slept on the decks of panzers crawling slowly along the roads, or sat on the turrets, on the track covers or the gun barrels themselves, their heads swaying as they slept upright.

  Many were civilians – elderly men, women of all ages, and large numbers of children, all mixed with the troops, riding or begging for places alongside the soldiers. Some of the civilians were armed with shotguns, pistols or military carbines, and walked almost like troops, with only backpacks and their guns. Others were trying to move their possessions in handcarts or wagons pulled by horses or oxen. Some refugees had brought their animals with them, and it was not unusual for our Panther crew men to jump down and clear a path through a huddle of cows, pigs or goats being driven by an old farmer with a stick.

  Behind our two surviving Panthers, the SS King Tigers gave lifts to SS men only –dozens of men on each panzer, their camouflage uniforms blending in well against the foliage and dappled light.

  On this narrow track, full of obstructions and abandoned vehicles, our progress was agonisingly slow, and we saw terrible sights as we passed through between the oak trees. Several times, Soviet aircraft flew over the tree canopy, firing randomly down at the forest floor, evidently not caring whether they hit anything, or what it was that they shot up. One such strafing attack sent a volley of cannon tracer tearing diagonally through the branches, ripping off heavy boughs and setting them alight. One tree limb crashed down onto a family pushing a handcart – a mother, grandmother and children – killing the two women. Their bodies were left in the undergrowth, and the dazed children took a few possessions from their cart, and simply started walking again, with no protection at all, soon disappearing in the column of foot traffic. Katyusha rockets also exploded in the trees, the shrapnel raining down on us along with splinters of wood that tore into the people clinging to the vehicles.

  The civilian woman acting as my guide, who was standing on my rear deck, was hit in the arm by such a splinter, and I gave her a bandage from our field dressing pack. She bandaged herself with gritted teeth, her eyes full of tears.

  At one point, in the afternoon, we halted to add oil to the engines and allow them to cool, as the crawling progress was overheating them dangerously. We steered our two Panthers off the track, and bulldozed aside several young trees to form a space away from the road without causing a break in the overhead foliage. As the Panther’s engine shut down, the metal clanged while it contracted, and the great Maybach unit hissed to itself in the shade. The King Tigers pulled up next to us, their engine decks emitting a haze of oily smoke, and their crewmen opened up the engine grilles to allow cooling.

  The Panther and Tiger engines were of a similar design: a motor unit encased in a solid armoured steel box, with the radiators in separate steel boxes on either side. This was intended to give protection from water if the panzer had to ford a river, because few bridges could take the forty-eight tonne weight of the Panther or the almost seventy tonnes of the King Tiger. But this protective design caused the motor unit to overheat easily in its steel coffin, and engine fires were a common problem.

  We poured in the last of our oil, then told our accompanying infantry that we would stop for one hour. We took the chance to check our track links and running gear while the infantry sprawled on the forest floor among the leaves and scrub. On the edge of our temporary clearing, some of the men were investigating a parked car: a German Horsch staff car, of the kind used by senior officers. They called us over to see what they had found.

  In the driver’s seat, an SS officer was sitting, staring through the wind shield, his head slumped against the door. He had shot himself through the temple, very recently – the pistol was in his hand, and the blood dripping from his head was still wet. Beside him, a woman in civilian clothes – an elegant summer dress and hat – was also dead, her hands clasped demurely in her lap, her eyes shut and a cigarette between her lips.

  The SS were in terror of the Reds now. After the years of laying waste to Russia, the pits full of bodies, the policy of taking no prisoners, the SS knew that the Reds would show th
em no mercy. And why should the Reds show mercy, after all? The SS had done things during their three years inside Russia which could barely be expressed in words. It was far better for an SS man to die with a bullet through his head, and with his pretty mistress beside him, than fall into the hands of the vengeful Soviets.

  There was nothing to be done about these two bodies in the Horsch car. We siphoned off their petrol tank, which was almost full, and shared it out among the panzers.

  The shadows were lengthening when we moved off again. The forest held so much life, so much death, and every angle in the track revealed new confusion and suffering. Civilians on foot called out to us endlessly, asking which way they should go, pleading for the chance to ride on the panzers. Some held their children out to us, showing us how exhausted and ill they were, telling us how far they had trekked on foot – for one hundred, or two hundred kilometres from the East. We could do nothing for these people, and at times our gunner had to use a shovel to beat back civilian men who tried to climb onto our hull.

  As the evening came on, my civilian guide told me that there were three or four kilometres remaining before we reached the central area of the forest.

  ‘We will have to be careful there,’ she added.

  ‘We?’ I asked her.

  ‘I assume I can remain with your panzer,’ she said. ‘As I have been helpful to your unit.’

  ‘How is your arm?’