The Wehrmacht also began sending our division untrained replacements from the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine who completely lacked any type of combat experience. When a group from the Luftwaffe appeared at our company’s position in the middle of a night lit by tracer fire from machine guns and rocked by the explosions of artillery rounds, it was obvious that they were scared stiff. Nonetheless, I ordered one of my men to take the new troops up to the front where we needed every available body.
Before the night ended, one of the new soldiers came back with a bullet wound through his hand that was obviously self-inflicted. As a veteran, I recognized that the man lacked training for combat and had simply acted out of fear. Following military regulations, I ordered the man to be sent to the rear to face a court-martial, but it was a duty that I despised.
During the struggle in the Samland, Lt. Col. Ebeling proved himself to be a highly capable commander. More than anyone else in our regiment, his leadership and tactical skill were essential in slowing the Red Army’s advance, even if the enemy’s numerical superiority made it a battle that we had no chance to win.
On March 24, Ebeling issued me a verbal promotion to the rank of captain (Hauptmann), but informed me that I would probably never receive a written confirmation in the chaos.
Subsequent to promotion to captain, all previous commanders of the 13th Company had quickly moved up to command a battalion of four infantry companies. Because officers were expected to lead from the front and infantry units bore the brunt of the fighting, their life expectancy was not high. The war did not last long enough for me to determine whether my destiny would have been the same.
FISCHHAUSEN: April 13–16, 1945
Following the surrender of Königsburg, a new Soviet offensive on April 13 brought about the collapse of the German defensive front in the Samland. In the aftermath, all German units began withdrawing westward toward the Frische Isthmus. Bordered by the Baltic Sea on the north and the Frische Bay on the south, this narrow, sandy strip of land provided the only remaining overland escape route west, similar to the function that the Kurische Isthmus had played for the German units evacuating Memel less than three months earlier.
A merciless Soviet artillery and air bombardment pursued our retreating forces, which were now mere shadows of what they had been in 1941. Our battered division was down to a few thousand men, while the 13th Company retained only about 100 men, a couple of dozen horses, one 150-millimeter gun, four 75-millimeter howitzers, four 105-millimeter mortars, and several supply wagons. Since our retreat to Memel, the intensity of the fighting had prevented me from riding Thea and I was now on foot.
Whenever the shellfire increased or enemy planes appeared overhead, we would run for cover. Resuming the march when the threat diminished, our ears remained tuned to the incoming rounds, attempting to determine each shell’s trajectory and potential danger. Even if we could almost guess when and where a round would impact, it was an intensely nerve-racking and exhausting experience.
Beyond the artillery shelling and bombing, we also now regularly endured attacks from a Red Army weapon that German soldiers called “the Stalin Organ” and the Russians called the Katyusha. Serving a combat role similar to the artillery, this multiple rocket launcher had been brought into increasing use over the second half of the war. After hearing the distinctive high-pitched whir of rockets firing off in quick succession, we could watch their contrails as they raced through the air toward us. The Stalin Organs proved particularly dangerous because of their capacity to devastate a wide area in a very brief period, much like our new 210-millimeter rockets.
As our column was traveling down the road late in the afternoon of the second day of the retreat, the sound of a Stalin Organ firing its rocket salvo instantly sent everyone scrambling for cover. Spotting one of the abandoned earth-camouflaged ammunition bunkers that lined the road, I made for the entrance 20 feet away. Just before I passed through the doorway, a piece of shrapnel from one of the rockets struck my temple in the exposed area just below my helmet.
Although leaving the side of my face bloodied, the wound proved minor and our medic had my head bandaged up within a couple of minutes. When I returned to the road, a private from my company came stumbling toward me. In a calm voice, he asked, “Will you tell my wife about me, sir? I am going to die now.” Since the soldier did not appear to be wounded, I disregarded his concern and responded, “You’re not going to die.”
Afterward, I began to wonder if my dismissal of his distress had been too hasty. I could have made more effort to learn about his condition. He might indeed have suffered a fatal shrapnel wound that was not immediately apparent. In addition to providing him with medical attention, I could have made some effort to reassure him. Though never learning his fate in the mounting chaos, my failure to aid a man who was possibly dying still pains me today.
Everything that we had endured in the preceding weeks would only foreshadow the events that occurred two days later, a dozen miles to the west. On April 16, the artillery of four Soviet armies combined with several hundred aircraft to unleash the culminating attack designed to annihilate the remaining German forces in the Samland. What ensued was the greatest catastrophe that I personally experienced during the war.
Our company had reached the small town of Fischhausen that morning. A key junction for roads from the north and east, it was located at the top of the narrow peninsula leading to the Frische Isthmus. The Red Army artillery that continued to pound us from a couple of miles to the east had now been joined by Soviet planes swarming through the skies overhead at an altitude of only 500 to 1,000 feet.
Scouting the route ahead for my men and guns, following about twenty yards behind me, I proceeded along the narrow main road into town. The shelling and bombing began to increase dramatically, probably doubling in intensity from what it had been on the road outside town. Between the unceasing barrage and the congested mass of units, the traffic had ground completely to a halt. In the growing disorder, the troops struggled to maintain control of their animals.
Keeping close to what was left of the abandoned one and two story homes along the street, I refrained from entering inside the dwellings that had not yet been destroyed, fearing that they might collapse if struck with a direct hit. Instead, whenever a new round whistled toward me or a plane appeared headed in my direction, I ducked behind the corners of the houses or into doorways. While the deafening explosions of shells and bombs constantly hammered the entire area, I would periodically break cover to press a little further ahead as my instincts dictated.
By the time I had advanced perhaps half a mile into Fischhausen, the hurricane of artillery fire and bombing on this chokepoint was creating an indescribable hell of carnage and chaos like nothing I had ever witnessed during the long years of war.
Wrecked equipment from the remnants of the four or five divisions was jumbled everywhere. The shattered, blackened corpses of men and horses in various stages of death lay strewn on the street. Only the increasing thunder of the barrage spared me from the pitiful moans of the wounded and the whimpering of dying animals.
The horrific scene overloaded my already shell-shocked senses, leaving me utterly numb and despondent. At that moment, I fully expected my life to end.
But I was not prepared to die. My sole purpose became to escape this nightmare and gather any other survivors from my company.
By this point, the bombardment had grown so heavy that it was clear I had to leave the main road or be killed. Unable to contact my men behind me in the chaos, I could only hope they would likewise realize that their only chance of survival was to leave behind the horses and guns and somehow make their own way out of Fischhausen.
Reaching a side alley off to the left, I headed a couple of short blocks to the edge of town. When I came to the southern outskirts, I resumed my course to the west, proceeding along a route that paralleled the main road located about 30 yards to my right. Remaining close to the houses for cover, I moved cautiously alo
ng ground that was slightly elevated above the bay about 100 yards away. Though the bombardment here was less concentrated than along the main street, shells and bombs continued to crash around me.
On reaching the far side of town, I moved back toward the main street about half a mile beyond where I had turned off to the shore. As I approached it, a Soviet Yak fighter plane came streaking toward Fischhausen, strafing everything in its path as it flew low above the road.
Spotting a row of foxholes next to the street, I instantly dove into one for cover. Yet, instead of sliding down to the bottom of the fivefoot-deep hole, I remained where I could observe the action, compelled by an insatiable curiosity to know what was happening around me.
Evidently having seen me take cover in the foxhole, the Yak pilot angled his aircraft directly toward my position. With my eyes protruding slightly above the rim of my foxhole, I felt almost mesmerized by the bright muzzle flashes of the fighter’s machine guns as it hurtled toward me through the sky.
Bullets began pelting the ground in front of me, spewing a cloud of dirt into my eyes and shattering into a hail of shrapnel that sprayed my face. As the plane roared low above me, I reeled backward in pain to the bottom of the foxhole.
A moment later, my brain began to evaluate my condition. My wounds felt slight, but my eyes revealed only blackness when I opened them. Huddled in the foxhole, I wondered anxiously whether my blindness would be permanent.
At the end of a couple of long, apprehensive minutes, my sight began to return, though I was still barely able to see through the crusts of blood and dirt.
Hauling myself up from my foxhole, I staggered onto the main street and surveyed the scene around me with hazy vision. Despite the steady rain of shells, a few troops were in the process of rendering their surviving artillery pieces inoperable by disabling the barrels, unable to haul them further after the horses had been killed.
Only an hour or so had passed since I had first entered Fischhausen about a mile back, but during that time most of what remained of the German Army in the Samland had been destroyed. With the Red Army’s capture of the area imminent, my only course was to search for any survivors from my company and seek new orders. The disaster at Fischhausen signified an end to much that I had known, but it also marked the start of my almost miraculous escape from Russian captivity.
Stumbling westward from the town as shells sporadically fell around me, I soon located a small remnant of men from my company beside an empty ammunition bunker a couple of miles away. My subsequent hunt for Lt. Colonel Ebeling proved nearly fatal when a squadron of Russian bombers pounded the area in which I was searching. Only just managing to take cover in a trench at the last second, I again eluded serious injury from my second air attack in a few hours.
Perhaps ten minutes later, I finally came across Ebeling attempting to organize a new defensive line in an effort to resist the enemy’s expected advance from the east. However illusory, my new written orders directed me to return to Hamburg to serve as part of the leadership cadre for a new division. While offering me a chance to escape back to central Germany, these orders required me to transfer command of my company’s surviving troops to the 32nd Division, an action which caused me lasting grief since it likely meant either death or captivity for them.
Two days afterward, on April 18, Senior Sgt. Jüchter and I made our way westward toward Pillau, under intermittent Red Army artillery fire. Crossing the narrow channel separating Pillau from the Frische Isthmus, we journeyed three dozen miles south by truck to an area on the Gulf of Danzig. From there, we boarded a ferry that took us to the port of Hela, isolated at the end of a long peninsula.
Jüchter’s death in a Russian artillery barrage two and a half weeks later reinvigorated my efforts to seek a way off Hela. The following day, I linked up with a Silesian infantry unit ordered to sail for central Germany. That night, we boarded a German destroyer heading west. All those who remained behind fell into Soviet hands.
Chapter 17
THE PRICE OF DEFEAT
May–July 1945
OCCUPIED GERMANY IN 1945
PRISONER OF WAR
“Herr Oberleutnant, der Krieg ist vorbei” (“Lieutenant, the war is finished”), a sailor’s somber voice announced to me in my bunk on the morning of May 9, just hours after our destroyer had departed Hela.
Germany’s unconditional surrender had officially come into effect at 2301 hours Central European time on May 8, though the process had already commenced several days earlier.
Hitler had committed suicide in Berlin on April 30, and been succeeded in power by Admiral Dönitz, who became Reichspräsident. On May 4, the British had accepted the military surrender of all German forces in Holland, northwest Germany, and Denmark in a ceremony held at the training area near Wendisch-Evern, where I had undergone much of my drilling during boot camp.
On the night of May 4, Dönitz, with British consent, ordered all available warships to sail across the Baltic Sea to the port of Hela and the Weichsel River Estuary near Stutthof. Their mission was to evacuate as many German soldiers and civilians to the west as they could in the short time that remained before the final surrender. The last of these ships, including the destroyers Karl Galster and “25,” left Hela at midnight on May 8. Only by chance had I joined the troops of a Silesian infantry regiment boarding one of those destroyers that night.
Though our small convoy of ships was still closer to territory occupied by the Red Army on the morning of May 9, we were determined to avoid surrender to the Russians. Ignoring Soviet demands for us to proceed directly to one of the ports under their control, the commander of our small convoy contacted the British for instructions. In addition to allowing the convoy to proceed to the Danish port of Copenhagen, the British authorized our commander to resist any attempt to force him to do otherwise.
Our failure to obey the Russian demand to sail for a harbor under their control brought an assault by a group of Soviet patrol boats later that morning. With German sailors firing every available weapon aboard the destroyers, the enemy boats quickly broke off the attack and escaped into the fog. Though not witnessing the engagement, the loud thumping of the ship’s guns was audible to me in my cabin below deck. It would be the last time I heard the fire of heavy guns in combat.
Years later, Lt. Col. Ebeling told me he had been evacuated at about the same time aboard a tug pulling a barge crammed with about 200 troops. As they were crossing the Baltic Sea, a storm struck. The tug survived, but all those on the barge drowned in one of those countless tragedies of the war’s final days.
When our destroyer arrived in the harbor at Copenhagen that afternoon, all personnel were ordered to disembark down a gangplank onto the dock. At a checkpoint there, waiting British soldiers would relieve us of any weapons as we began our internment as prisoners of war.
While still aboard ship, I withdrew my Luger pistol from one of my tunic’s pockets. To make the weapon inoperable, I removed its firing pin and tossed it overboard into the harbor. Replacing my superior Astra pistol in the holster with the now useless Luger, I then slipped the Astra into my tunic pocket, anticipating that I might need it for some unforeseen eventuality. Last, I took off my Iron Cross First Class and dropped it into one of my pockets.
Reaching the checkpoint, I handed the Luger to the waiting English soldier. Much to my surprise, he angrily shouted at me in perfect unaccented German. With a hate-filled expression, he proceeded to rip the officer’s shoulder boards and decorations from my uniform leaving me stunned and humiliated.
Without another word, he gestured for me to move on. Retaining my composure with great difficulty, I resigned myself to my new status as a POW. In retrospect, I suspect that the soldier might have been a Jewish-German immigrant to Britain who took indirect revenge on me for the bitter experience he had endured before departing Germany. Otherwise, in my experience, the British troops behaved correctly and professionally, though they appeared to be wary of us.
From the
checkpoint, I immediately joined about two or three thousand German soldiers piling aboard a large freighter. Recognizing no one, I mostly kept to myself during the 20-hour voyage south. However, I felt an obligation to do what I could to assist other German officers attempting to maintain military discipline among the enlisted troops, a problem which had become a mounting challenge.
Another officer told me that an ad hoc court-martial committee comprised of four or five colonels had conducted a trial and issued a death sentence against an enlisted man who had attacked a German officer aboard ship. Attaching a heavy base plate from a mortar to the convicted soldier’s back, they shot him and threw the body overboard.
When we entered the small harbor of Heiligenhafen in the Schlesweig-Holstein region of northern Germany the next day, British troops were again waiting at the end of the gangplank, this time to hand-pump a delousing powder on us before we marched off to internment.
The harbor was located about three or four miles from the entrance to a sprawling, open-air POW camp established in the region’s rolling farmland. Like sheep herded into a pen, hundreds of thousands of surrendered German soldiers crowded into a roughly 30-square-mile area around the small villages of Gremersdorf, Nanndorf, and Altgalendorf. A few British soldiers patrolled the boundary of the territory, but the perimeter remained unfenced.
Inside the internment area, the British delegated to Wehrmacht officers the responsibility for maintaining order among the interned troops. They even authorized us to carry sidearms, apparently unconcerned how we might have retained such weapons.
Upon reaching an isolated farm, I was charged with the supervision of an improvised company of a couple of hundred men from the ship. While making little effort to assert control over my assigned soldiers, I soon realized that it would be difficult to maintain even minimal discipline, even with an Astra in my holster.
At Leningrad's Gates Page 23
