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

by Wolfgang Faust

  ‘These are Seydlitz men!’ I shouted to the onrushing troops, trying to push them back. Several of them halted, and a knot of troops and civilians gathered around me, but the vast bulk of this tide of people surged on past us. I shouted to them to stop, to stay away from the station, to ignore the signs.

  Inside the station, the shooting began within seconds.

  I saw the muzzle flashes light up the footbridge in the darkness, not only from one side, but from both ends of the site. Screams tore the air among the rapid, unceasing machine gun shots, and the crowd surging to the station faltered, stumbled, and many fell. The people behind them, though, were confused and running blindly, not seeing where the shots were coming from, and they kept rushing on, trampling and stamping on those who were falling. Within seconds, in addition to the massacre taking place inside the station, the ground around our panzer was strewn with wounded and trampled foot soldiers, civilians and children, as the crowd broke and began to run wildly for any available cover.

  I leaped back onto the Panther and ordered the driver to advance on the station. That was hopeless, though – the entrance area was thick with people, especially civilians with carts, huddling together and not knowing which way to turn. The shooting from the station reached a crescendo, and grenades began to explode in there, with the characteristic hollow crack of the Soviet bombs that spread such vicious splinters. The dim landscape was lit by these flashes, and by the shouts and screams of the trapped victims from within the station precincts, and still by the fires and detonations of the bombardment in Halbe itself.

  A soldier came running out of the station, his face a mask of blood, his eyes wide and staring.

  ‘Make the people follow you,’ he shouted to me. ‘They will follow a panzer, Herr Feldwebel. Lead them away from the station, for God’s sake.’

  ‘But the people in the station - ’

  ‘They are dead, all dead,’ he shouted. ‘Lead these others away, in the name of God!’

  We drove the Panther slowly away from the station, across the open ground, scattering the milling crowds of leaderless, confused soldiers and frantic civilians. They formed up behind us, in the constant manner of stragglers, and stumbled after us as we moved away. I dreaded encountering land mines in this open space, or a return of the intense artillery bombardment, but we entered a heathland punctuated by bracken and scrub, in which, with only the moonlight and distant flames, it was difficult to make out any way ahead.

  A civilian man who knew the area climbed up beside me, and with his directions we crawled away from Halbe, picking up a narrow road that crossed the Halbe rail line at a barrier point. This crossing was strewn with abandoned trucks and equipment, and beyond it the road led west through overhanging trees, going into a forest. There were flashes here as artillery shells exploded in the fields on either side, but these were fired randomly and caused only limited casualties to the massed ranks behind us. It became too dark to navigate, or to steer, and the danger of shedding a track or grounding the Panther and damaging its running gear was a constant anxiety. A shape loomed up in front of us, with two red, glowing stacks – and we almost collided with the Capo’s Panther which was stationary at a curve in the forest track. We took the decision to halt and move on at first light.

  A few minutes later, at around two in the morning, our two Panthers were concealed under trees off the road, and the horde of infantry and others who had followed us away from the station were finding places to lay themselves down on the pine needles between the tree trunks. From among the infantry, we posted a perimeter guard, and then we broke into a forestry hut that our civilian guide found for us. Inside, in the dark, the Capo said,

  ‘So we are through Halbe. The King Tigers are somewhere ahead now, we have simply lost touch with them. We must carry on by ourselves for now. We have to watch out for those Seydlitz men. I hear that the station was packed with dead bodies, three or four deep.’

  ‘We can identify the Seydlitz men by their uniforms,’ I said. ‘They are clean and well presented. Unlike our troops.’

  The Capo peered through the window shutter at the crowds of troops and civilians outside.

  ‘Our troops know that the war is lost,’ he said. ‘How many want to fight now? Only a quarter or a third of our men will fight any longer. The rest will let others fight for them.’

  ‘Then we will fight with the quarter or the third,’ I said.

  The Capo lit a kerosene lamp on minimum light, and unfolded a map.

  ‘I took this from a dead artillery man,’ he said. ‘See here, it shows where we are.’

  He showed me our location. We were in a triangular stretch of woodland, South West of Halbe, which was bisected by the country railroad and by various forestry tracks. The map extended West to the Elbe itself, where the Twelfth Army were holding open the corridor that would lead us to the Americans. Between our patch of forest and the Twelfth Army were two remaining milestones to cross.

  First, the North-South Autobahn that ran up and down this part of Germany, dead straight. We believed that the Russians had just charged up this Autobahn in their advance on Berlin itself to the North. If so, most of their forces would be fighting in Berlin, leaving the rural hinterland thinly guarded.

  ‘That’s the plan,’ the Capo said. ‘And after we cross the Autobahn, we have to cross the railroad line, about twenty kilometres further. After that, we should find the Twelfth Army boys waiting for us. And then, hello America.’

  His finger moved across the map. The Autobahn, the railroad, and then the River Elbe. I laughed in a grim way, but that only made the pain in my back sharper.

  *

  In the past, I had slept easily enough in a panzer: the thin, metal chair made a good perch, and you rested your head on the turret wall or on the gun breech, with your forehead on your linked fingers for a pillow. If you were in the panzer all night, a shell case was your toilet, and fresh air came from opening the hatch to empty it. In this way, three men could pass the night in the turret cage, and the other two crew men on their seats in the hull.

  On that night in the woodland West of Halbe, though, I did not want to sleep. I took another mouthful of amphetamines, painkillers and schnapps. The forest around my Panther was not sleeping either: it was filled with voices, cries, the wailing of children and the sound of equipment being readied for our next stage of the breakout. Searching for aspirin, I fumbled in my tunic pocket, and found the photo of the young woman that the lady on the Panther’s deck had given me before she died. A grey light was coming through the cupola, and I climbed out to examine the photo more fully. The girl was a beauty, and like all lonely soldiers, I imagined that she might be good, understanding company for a man such as me. There was an address on the back, a town to the west of the Elbe, in the American occupied sector of Germany. There was no name for the girl. I smiled, and put the photo safely in my pocket again.

  A few birds were singing, but that stopped as the sound of bombardment grew from the countryside to our West. Close at hand, in the forest, there was more noise – shouting and cursing, and people clamouring for attention.

  I went into the trees to see what this was. I found a scrum of our soldiers hunched over something on the ground, in the dawn light. I pushed through them, and with the authority that came from a panzer uniform at this point in the fighting, the infantry made way for me slowly. I found that a group of German troops had found a Seydlitz man.

  The Seydlitz agent was pressed back against the roots of a tree, clenching his fists, gritting his teeth. His field-grey uniform had a German eagle but no swastika, and one of our men handed me an armband that had been in the Seydlitz man’s pocket.

  In the service of The National Committee for a Free Germany

  This was what the Seydlitz agents called their organisation. Looking around, I realised that the small crowd did not only contain soldiers. Various German women were present, some of them armed, and also a handful of children and youths of about ten years to
maybe fifteen years of age. One of the women stepped forward, and threw a rope upward, over the branch of the nearest tree.

  An aircraft flew overhead, then another two planes, so low that their slipstream shook the tree canopy. I heard their cannon firing into the forest to the East, and then the slow thump of exploding vehicles from somewhere over there.

  With this background, the Seydlitz man was hanged on the tree, his throat emitting a dreadful rattle, while the circle of troops, youths and women watched. His jerking, kicking heels were seized by a German boy of ten or twelve years, who swung and pulled on them to break the Seydlitz man’s neck and silence the hideous sounds that were coming from his mouth.

  ‘It is not decent,’ I heard the boy say to his mother, as the hanged man’s feet swung around silently in a circle above us. ‘Such sounds are not decent in a German forest.’

  *

  The Autobahn and the Railroad

  We moved slowly out to the main path, which was already filling up with mismatched human and vehicle traffic that had entered this patch of forest during darkness, having traversed the nightmare of Halbe itself. We set our compass and aimed West. I moved ahead of the Capo’s Panther, and together our two panzers advanced at walking pace, with frequent stops, in the pearlescent light of the spring morning. On our left, incendiary explosions rolled across the horizon, and from the Panther’s cupola I could see trees in the distant fields being blown up and set on fire by the blasts. I believed that the unit there were the remains of our 21st Division Panzergrenadiers, holding back the Reds from our columns. At times, wounded infantry would appear in the pastures near the road, limping or carrying their comrades. They told us that the line was holding over there, but the Reds were constantly probing our flanks with their panzers, infantry and Seydlitz men.

  The Sturmoviks came over us repeatedly, so often that the air was almost never free of the scream of their engines. There was a Flak gun on a broken-down half- track at one point in a copse near the road, manned by a crew of Hitler Youth, Luftwaffe men and civilian girls. This ragged crew threw off their camouflage netting and foliage, and fired up at the swooping Red aircraft. They managed to hit one plane – sending tracer through one wing, and causing a huge plume of flame to erupt from it. The Sturmovik flipped onto its back, with metal debris streaming out in the flames in its slipstream, and crashed into the forest ahead. The victory was momentary: the following two planes spotted the Flak at once, and raked it with their incendiary shells, leaving the bodies of the crew burning among the barrels of their gun.

  In the early light, the Russian forces tested us and pushed at our lines. Our two Panthers were moving with a group of about five hundred infantry and civilians who had come through Halbe with us, and we were in no condition to withstand a sustained attack from the flanks. As the sun rose, my worst fears in this respect became a reality.

  Through the trees, we saw that three Josef Stalin panzers had appeared outside the forest, on the distant heath, patrolling across the open land and traversing their turrets as they surveyed our segment of the woodland. We immediately halted, trusting that our vehicles were screened by the trees, and we watched the Stalins as they prowled across the landscape out there. To engage them would surely bring a further detachment of Red panzers down upon us, leading to the destruction of the few hundred people we had brought through from Halbe. Our column of foot soldiers and civilians, meanwhile, threw themselves onto the forest floor, and drove their animals off among the trees.

  In moments, our thousand pairs of eyes were watching silently as the three Stalins moved slowly past our part of the treeline, at a distance of about one kilometre from us.

  I was inside the turret, and my gunner had his face to the gun sight, with his hand on the firing lever, his feet moving the turret fractionally to keep the Stalins in his scope. I could see the sweat dripping down the side of his neck, and the quiver in his fingers as he held the lever.

  For a panzer commander, one immediate tactical decision in a concealment situation is whether to shut down your vehicle’s engine or not. The engine, even when idling, is noisy; and if the enemy for some reason shuts off his engine, he will hear you; or, if the enemy is accompanied by an infantry screen, they will hear you if they move away from the sound of their own panzers. On the other hand, if you turn your engine off, there is the danger that it may be slow to start if you need to move away urgently, and also, without the transmission running under the turret, you can only traverse your turret slowly with the hand crank. Weighing this up, I kept the engine running – because the enemy Stalins were still some distance away, and I could see no infantry with them.

  As another precaution, I ordered my loader to load high explosive and have a round of armor-piercing ready in his hands. Like the T34s against the King Tigers, I knew that the best way to deal with a bigger, heavier tank was to blow its tracks off with the first shot, and then to use a penetrating round. The three Stalins came closer, and then halted, trailing fumes, at a range of barely six to eight hundred metres outside the trees.

  I swallowed.

  The Stalins spewed out exhaust smoke, and then continued their slow progress past us. Five hundred hearts were pounding in rhythm with their engines, I am sure. As they began to depart, the rearmost Stalin turned its turret to us, and fired a long burst of machine gun from its co-axial along our tree line. The bullets ripped up the trees at head height, and ricocheted off the hull of our Panther, and then ceased. Apparently satisfied, the Stalin moved on slowly.

  I breathed in deep relief – but as I did so, a civilian man bolted out from the trees beside us, waving his arms in surrender.

  ‘Scheisse, he’s gone mad under the pressure,’ my radio man said.

  The civilian was an elderly man, and he was followed by two more people – a woman and a girl, who were either seeking to surrender also, or trying to restrain their relative before he gave us all away. I then saw a Wehrmacht soldier near my panzer stand up, aim with his carbine and shoot the three people down, one after the other. They tumbled and fell like rabbits in the long grass. I had no time for sympathy – I was watching that last Stalin. The great panzer halted, and rotated its hull to face onto us.

  ‘He saw the shooting,’ my driver said. ‘Or he saw the people running.’

  Our luck was that bad – that the Stalin commander had seen the civilians run and fall, and he wanted to know why. The Stalin fired a shot: a high explosive round which burst in the trees above and sent shrapnel and wood blasting down around us. A group of civilians was hit, and they began charging in panic out onto the heath. Several soldiers also went out, with their hands raised. They were immediately cut down by the Stalin’s machine gun, which swept across them at neck height, decapitating many of the men. Their headless bodies slumped down, with their hands still raised. The other two Stalins turned front-on to us, and began firing their main guns into the woods also.

  The rounds tore open the tree line in front of us, and despite the smoke, the many people running and hiding on the edge of the forest must now have become visible. A tree crashed to earth, revealing our Panther fully. In some ways, I was relieved – now we were to fight as panzer men again, machine against machine, and not hide with the old men and the fearful women in the forest. I ordered my gunner to fire the high explosive round in the breech.

  Our round was laid perfectly, and it exploded just right of centre against the front plate of that Stalin which had discovered us. Through the periscope, I saw its drive wheel go spinning away, dragging the track with it. The Stalin’s barrel was still lowered for its lengthy reloading, and for these few moments the Red panzer was vulnerable.

  We fired again, with the armour-piercing, and this shot struck the Stalin on the gun mantle. I saw the whole turret jerk with the concussion, as metal debris flew around the machine. The Stalin began trying to reverse, keeping its front facing to us, but its missing track meant that it moved slowly, and was dragging itself at an angle. If that Red driver panick
ed now, and accelerated, the single track would slew the whole vehicle sideways and present its thinner flank armour to us. I ordered my gunner to hold fire unless this happened. Meanwhile, we advanced out of the trees, onto the flat land, to engage the enemy with freedom of movement.

  To my right, the Capo’s Panther was firing on the other two Stalins, his tracer rebounding off one of them, hitting the other and deflecting from that one off into the heathland. The Capo too moved out onto the heath, halting to aim his next shot. A round from one of the Stalins hit his turret top and ricocheted off, carving a path through the trees between us. I saw that a group of our infantry were approaching those two Stalins from the side, with Panzerfausts, and it appeared the Russian crews had not seen them.

  I heard my gunner grunt in anticipation – and saw that the disabled Stalin had begun to speed up, the movement turning its flank towards us. The Stalin twitched as the single track gripped the ground, and in a spray of dust it began to turn sideways on, with its big silhouette clear in the morning haze. My gunner put his shot cleanly through the lower hull, just above the running gear. For a moment, the Stalin kept moving, as if the round had not penetrated – but then the turret began to traverse wildly and the whole machine began to shudder. I knew what was happening in there: the exploding ammunition in the hull was building up a blast wave of pressure which would inevitably rip the turret from the hull, or split the hull itself open. No panzer ever built could withstand such internal pressures. Indeed, the Stalin’s long, oblong turret suddenly rose up into the air, lifted by a flash of expanding flame, and tumbled over, spilling out the bodies of the turret crew. The hull lay juddering, sending out spirals of exploding ammunition into the morning light.

  Both our Panthers focussed now on the two remaining Stalins. Those Red gun barrels were elevated again, and from the traversing of their turrets I saw that they were both taking aim at my Panther. I told my driver to accelerate, out into the heath, hoping that we could move faster than their turrets could turn. At the same time, we traversed our turret rapidly onto them, finishing our short run with a slew to one side, to bring our gun more quickly around to aim at the Reds. A few seconds of shouted commands, my gunner rotating the turret a few centimetres and operating the gun elevation for his final calculations. Just as the Stalins turned their massive guns directly onto us, my gunner was able to get a shot onto the nearest one, a shot which at this close range split open the top of the turret where it joined the side.