Officer Cadet Alfred Kraus recalled:
Half frozen and dead tired, one or two evenings later, we were moved towards Alt Drewitz. The road where we were deployed was only built up on one side. Undeveloped land extended to the south-west and beyond it the Warthe could be seen behind the Cellulose Factory.
That evening a young girl appeared from a nearby farm and asked for our help. She had stayed behind alone with the cattle. We warned her and advised her to go to Küstrin and on to the west, but she went back saying: ‘I simply cannot leave the cattle to their fate!’
Originally we were meant to attack along the road leading in a north-westerly direction, but our company commander, Lieutenant Schellenberg, received a change in orders. In our place a Hungarian infantry battalion from the Stülpnagel Barracks would conduct the counterattack. A few hours later the poor chaps brought their wounded back crying. We sat on the doorsteps of the houses, knowing what we had been spared.
Entering the houses was strongly forbidden but, after three or four days of being out in the open in heavy frost and without proper sleep, I went into a house with my friend Nils Fauck, where we fell on the beds on the first floor without removing our boots and overcoats. We slept until our screaming sergeant woke us with: ‘Stupid! Court martial!’ and other threats. This had no effect, as we were still tired. Our company was given a bottle of almost frozen Sekt per man and then was supposed to attack the Cellulose Factory across open fields in the dark and occupy it. No shots were fired and we encountered no Russians. We stumbled across two dead horses at the factory gates. I was sent as a runner towards the south to establish contact with the forward platoon there as dawn was breaking. In unfamiliar territory I came across 200 unarmed Hungarians sitting behind a plank fence. They pointed the way to the factory for me. Suddenly I saw some motionless men lying in a row. When they failed to react to my call, I took courage and approached them. They were about 20 dead Hungarians. A white rag hung from a stick. By the time I reached the factory both our platoons had already linked up without encountering any Russians.
We occupied a position in front of the factory’s wood store with a field of fire to the north-west across open land between the Warthe and Alt Drewitz. There were two shot-up Soviet tanks of American construction on the factory premises. A Volkssturm man, presumably an engineer from the factory as he appeared here several times, had knocked them out with a Panzerfaust. He showed me the way it had happened. Neither tank was burnt out, nor did they contain corpses, but there was a completely flattened Russian nearby. So we were able to help ourselves to cigars, bread and schnapps from the tanks. Further on we found on the premises a 105mm anti-aircraft gun with all its equipment, including numerous anti-aircraft machine guns on tripods, which were slow-firing but used normal infantry ammunition, so that each section got its own machine guns. Gradually with the help of the unarmed but friendly Hungarians we built up our positions and even received some Panzerfausts. The Hungarians were withdrawn once the construction work was finished, but I do not know where they went.
Once the period of frost was over, the soggy soil of the open terrain between the Cellulose Factory and the Drewitzer Unterweg to Alt Drewitz prevented the construction of any positions there. Consequently we were secured at night by having listening posts. During the daytime the open terrain was fully exposed and within our field of fire, as well as fire from the Cellulose Factory and also the Drewitzer Unterweg. Several times the Russians infiltrated behind us but were always driven back.
The company command post was incomprehensibly located not in the Cellulose Factory but far back on Plantagenstrasse near the Potato Meal Factory in one of the modern three-storey housing blocks. As runner, I was responsible for exchanging our radio batteries. Once I encountered our quartermaster-sergeant in a drunken state with the company headquarters troop shooting at empty Sekt bottles with pistols. I was given a rocket for not saluting him properly.[33]
Lieselotte Christiansen later described her experiences as a 13-year-old child:
When the war reached Küstrin, I lived in Warnick.
On the 31st January the first Soviet tanks penetrated as far as the centre of the Neustadt, but were successfully repulsed and things became quiet again for a while. One day later, on the 1st February, at about 2100 hours it started up again and we heard the first shots. We people from Langardesmühlen decided to move into the cellars of an old villa belonging to Max Falckenberg, in front of which was a spacious park, which would later prove useful to us. The sounds of firing diminished at about midnight, and a German NCO appeared in the cellars and told us that the Russians were in Landsberg. As the distance from Küstrin to Landsberg was about 45 kilometres, we felt safe for the moment. But this was an error, for shortly afterwards we heard Russian voices and the firing started up again. The Russians were lying well back in the park and firing at the villa, which had been occupied by our troops. As well as he could, the NCO kept us informed about the situation outside, where there had been many killed on both sides.
Shortly before 0700 hours on the morning of the 2nd February, a German soldier appeared and told us that the NCO had been killed. There was a short truce in the fighting during which we were advised to leave as quickly as possible, which we did. We came to Schiffbauerstrasse. Near the Bennewitz abattoir a man told us that Küstrin had been surrounded and the bridges destroyed, so we stayed in Schiffbauerstrasse and experienced the siege of Küstrin until the end of February with constant shelling, bombing, dead soldiers and even Stalin-Organs one day. We were sitting in the kitchen when there was suddenly an ear-splitting din. The house next door had been pulverised. My mother and other people from Langardesmühlen were trapped in the cellar and had to be released through the cellar windows.
From the middle of February we got a daily newspaper called Feste Küstrin, reporting important events in the town and including the Wehrmacht Report.[34]
Chapter Six
The Russians Close In
With the arrival of the 16th Anti-Aircraft Artillery Division, the 8th Guards Army was able to resume its crossing operation in daylight on 3 February. The loss of three aircraft in the first attack of the day obliged the Luftwaffe to change tactics from attacks en masse to individual sorties. Consequently, most of the infantry divisions of the 4th Guards Rifle Corps and the 79th Guards Rifle Division (28th Guards Rifle Corps) crossed the river with minimal losses, taking their artillery observers with them, although the guns had to remain on the east bank for the time being, as no bridging or ferrying facilities had come forwards with the 8th Guards Army’s vanguard.
That day saw the rapid and virtually unopposed expansion and unification of three small bridgeheads into one extending for several kilometres from Reitwein to Kietz and reaching as far forward as the Frankfurt–Küstrin railway line, which thus became unusable. The 35th Guards Rifle Division went on to occupy the southern part of Kietz and some terrain to the west of the suburb, while the 47th Guards Rifle Division occupied Neu Manschnow about noon and moved on to block the Küstrin–Seelow highway (Reichsstrasse 1) in Manschnow itself.[1] The following day Soviet scouts were seen as far forward as the Golzow–Alt Tucheband road.[2]