Mushrooms of smoke rose into the clear sky above the Neustadt in rapid succession, distinctly apart at first, then combining as a grey wall at the foot of which a rose-coloured glow quickly spread as the first bright red flames took hold. A number of 130mm explosive and incendiary shells had hit about three dozen houses. Within a few minutes most of them were alight from the roof to the ground floor. Showers of sparks ignited curtains, while broken furniture and rafters were scattered over the streets. A witness to this event reported:
We were sitting down to afternoon coffee, having taken the precaution of going down into the cellar, which I with my war experience considered safer. Suddenly an explosion shook our house, others following shortly after again and again, and whitewash fell from the ceiling. After a short while it was suddenly quiet again, but now there was a frightful sound of burning. We left everything and ran upstairs to be confronted by a horrible sight. Our house on the edge of the Neumarkt, right opposite the water tower, had not been hit, but several neighbouring buildings were ablaze. The tram depot was completely destroyed and there were craters on the market place. Several doors and windows had been torn off their hinges, and the paper was hanging off the wall in strips. All the bottles of conserves in the dining room were broken by the blast. The roof had been torn off and the balcony was only hanging on to the façade as indistinguishable iron rods. The Radio-Helm building was in flames. Except for our house, no building on the Neumarkt had survived the bombardment.
This was not such an unusual sight for most of the firemen, for most had been involved in the air raids on Berlin. Following the first such raids in November 1942, the simple Küstrin fire engines, like others in a wide area around Berlin, had been modernised on a generous scale. Then in the summer of 1944 they conducted an exercise in rescuing trapped people from a narrow street in the Altstadt known as the Wassergasse. Now the route to the deployment site was much closer. The smoke and flame-engulfed quarter was isolated at street junctions and gaps between the buildings to stop the spread of fire to the rest of the neighbourhood. The ruins in the Neumarkt, in the neighbourhood of the town centre around the Stern, and the streets leading to the railway station, gradually cooled down.
Meanwhile the inhabitants of the affected area had taken shelter with friends and relations or had requisitioned empty properties for themselves. No one can say how many people were affected by the explosions, or if all reached the cellars in time. Only two severely injured were reported.[13]
Under General Reinefarth the fortress area was divided into two defence sectors, Altstadt and Neustadt. The larger sector consisted of the Neustadt on the right bank of the Warthe, where the majority of the population lived and most of the military establishments such as barracks, drill squares and exercise areas, hospital, magazine, bakery and supply depot were located, as was the Neues Werke bastion north-east of the main railway station. This sector also contained the town’s gas works, water works, a sewage farm, a civil hospital, the cemetery and a large industrial complex.
Despite his total lack of experience in such a role, and in the face of protests from Headquarters 9th Army, Reinefarth appointed fellow policeman Colonel Walter of the Feldgendarmerie as commander of the Neustadt Defence Sector, a decision he was later to regret with the words: ‘For lack of relevant previous experience, the situation was consequently not mastered. There was no other officer available as sector commander.’ That there was no senior military officer of adequate rank and experience for this role in the garrison is hard to believe.
The Neustadt Defence Sector was overlooked by Height 63, which provided the besiegers with observation over the town. With their backs to the Warthe and Oder, a full two-thirds of the garrison awaited the enemy attack here in positions that ran from the Cellulose Factory, through divided Alt Drewitz, then around a bulge to the north, east via the Küstrin Forestry Office and across the Zorndorfer Chaussee, then in an up and down curve to the south-south-west (about 500 metres east of the water works) to the Jungfern Canal at Warnick.
The remaining parts of the town formed the Altstadt Defence Sector. This included the Altstadt with the Island, Kietz and Kuhbrücken, and for a while also Neu Bleyen and the dyke-enclosed area to Alt Bleyen. The Kietz and Bleyen areas were apportioned between the fortress and the ‘pipeline’ defenders according to the situation. The sector commander was 55-year-old Major Otto Wegner, in civilian life the manager of the city administration office of Schneidemühl, whose military experience had been in the infantry. He had been awarded the Iron Cross 1st and 2nd Class in the First World War, and the bar to both Iron Crosses in the Second World War during the Polish campaign. In the Russian campaign he had commanded the 1st Battalion, Infantry Regiment 96, of the 32nd Infantry Division, for which he was awarded the German Cross in Gold. At the beginning of 1945 he was given command of Replacement Battalion 4 in Kolberg and, upon release of the code-word ‘Gneisenau’, went with it to the Filehne area on the Netze River 10 kilometres east of Kreuz, where his battalion became part of the ‘Woldenberg’ Division and took part in the subsequent retreat to Küstrin.[14]
The spring floods, preceded by the thaw, turned the little Altstadt into an island. In the east the flooded area, several kilometres wide from the Warthe to the Oder, was only broken by the dykes carrying the two railway lines and the two chaussees. Field emplacements on these narrow causeways secured the approaches. Where the chaussee from Göritz joined the Oder dyke some 2 kilometres from the citadel lay the Bienenhof outpost, which became the focus of constant skirmishing. It was defended mainly by members of Probation Battalion 500, whom Reinefarth described as ‘Küstrin’s best troops’. The Bienenhof was often cited in his morning and daily reports. From here, opposite the Dammeisterei (dyke master’s house), the defensive positions ran parallel to and not far from the Oder dyke about 1,200 metres north, crossed the Göritz railway embankment to Kietzerbusch Railway Halt, then went further north curving east to where the road and railway bridges crossed the Warthe.
The Altstadt offered good defensive possibilities provided that the defenders could counter enemy artillery and air attacks with the equivalent weapons and intensity of fire, which was not the case. Further disadvantages for the Germans derived from the crammed nature of the Altstadt and the inflammable nature of many of the old buildings due to their high wood content, as well as the fragility of the century-old casemates that were not capable of withstanding heavy calibre bombs and shells. Keeping the Altstadt, Bienenhof and Kietz in German hands depended upon holding the Island and the two ancient lunettes in the Pappelhorst thickets.[15] The small suburb of Kietz on the west bank of the Vorflut Canal protected Küstrin’s precarious supply route to the link with Gorgast at this point. Hard fighting could be expected here, as the besiegers would try to take the road and railway bridges over the Vorflut Canal to separate the fortress from its line of supply. The German positions in Kietz extended from the railway embankment (here connected to the 2nd Battalion, 119 Panzergrenadier Regiment, 25th Panzergrenadier Division) to the western end of Kietz as far as the Dammeisterei at the entrance to the Vorflut Canal.
15
Kohlase [BO], pp. 164–6. The sources only mention one lunette on the Island but aerial photographs show two side by side protecting the Artillery Barracks from the southern tip, that nearest the Oder being the remains of an earlier defensive work along the river embankment and balanced by another, since covered by the Altstadt railway station development.