Now we urgently needed the hand grenades that we lacked. We had to keep our heads down. Once they had got through the thick hedge we could see them off, but the Russians recognised this obstacle. Some of them kept us down with their fire, while a group attempted to get through the gate, which they managed to do. We could see individual shadows flitting about towards the manor but did not know whether they were comrades or Russians.
Here was general confusion. We could only reply weakly to the enemy’s fire. We received the order to withdraw and made our way back, finally meeting up with the company on Reichsstrasse 1. Lieutenant Kühnel was swearing, blaming the minelayers. He regarded the whole action with the barbed wire and mine-laying as ridiculous. Then I noticed that Hans Hof was missing. I found out that he had fired at the attackers with his machine gun, thus attracting enemy fire, and had been shot in the chest. Comrades from another section had taken him back to the dressing station in Kietz. In all the noise and confusion I had failed to notice this.
We cursed the Russians and were bitterly angry with them. Our company commander soon gave the order for a counterattack. Within an hour, before midnight, the Weinbergshof was to be in our hands again.
We set off full of anger. Two sections went east of the duck pond and mine went along the communications trench. As we reached the manager’s house we heard a mortar firing and then the bursting of the first bombs. The Russians were laying down defensive fire, but those that had forced their way in remained quiet.
As I went past my shelter hole I saw a dead man lying in the trench in front of me. He was one of the men from the punishment company. I took his pay book from his breast pocket. The poor chap had been unable to reach safety.
While I was seeing to the dead man, a shout went up in the dark from the south-east side of the pond, like an animal’s cry. Corporal Schorer had surprised a Russian in the trench near his shelter hole and hit him with his rifle butt on the head. The Russian ran away and disappeared into the darkness.
I was the last section commander to reach the company command post in the manor cellars. I gave the dead man’s pay book to the company commander. The retaking of the position had succeeded and by midnight all the sections were back in their positions. The Russians had penetrated the company command post and left an anti-tank mine in a discreet wooden case behind. Presumably they had intended planting it when they had more time.
Unfortunately the counterattack had cost us dear. Both section commanders, Sergeant August Finkler and Sergeant Willi Bohnsack, had fallen victim to the mortar. We were not allowed to bury the dead ourselves, having to give the last services for both our comrades to strangers. A pity. We were not allowed to leave the position even for a short time.
We did not know what had happened to the punishment company. They had not completed their work. Our position remained insecure from the south with neither barbed wire nor mines.[39]
Chapter Seven
Evacuation
By 19 February the nightly passage of the supply convoys had already lasted a week without any significant incidents. Now at last the civilian population was to be evacuated by the same route. Those concerned had been waiting impatiently for this moment, yet very little had been done to prepare for it.
Fearing accusations of defeatism, the Party authorities had caused the subject of civilian evacuation to be ignored throughout the preceding weeks, but now entered a hectic debate about how it should be conducted. There was no hint of a plan for informing the inhabitants or for any sort of organisation at the assembly point. No provision was made for assisting the elderly and handicapped, who constituted a considerable part of the remaining population. Eventually the Neustadt was chosen as the first area to be evacuated, with the square in front of the Boys’ Middle School, now the main dressing station, designated as the assembly point at 1800 hours. The fortress newspaper did not appear that day because of the failure in the electricity supply, so leaflets had to be prepared but, for the same reason, these were insufficient in number to convey the evacuation instructions to everyone, and many people had to rely on word of mouth as the means of passing on the official instructions.
Although a large group of people duly assembled for the breakout at the appointed time, they first had to wait for transportation while the route to Alt Bleyen was discussed for hours. The halftracks could only drive as far as Alt Bleyen, and for a regular shuttle service through the ‘corridor’ some form of intermediate transportation was necessary. The women, children and old people had already walked 2 kilometres to the school and were unable to walk on twice that distance to the front line in the dark. Apart from two tractors with trailers and three horse-drawn carts, there were no other means of transport available from civilian resources, and urgent pleas resulted in two trucks being sent from the fortress headquarters. This for an estimated 2–3,000 people!
Reinefarth’s staff suddenly intervened when he suspected that soldiers desperate to escape the war might try to make use of the evacuation certificates. These were typewritten blank forms–three to a page–reading ‘On the orders of the fortress commandant, Frau—with—children/Herr—from Küstrin,—Street No.—, is to leave Küstrin as part of the general evacuation. The receiving district is Westprignitz.’ Not only was there no master list of inhabitants with names and addresses, but there was also no time to complete the individual certificates, so they were merely stamped and signed, often by young helpers. However, Reinefarth need not have worried, for even if the certificates fell into the hands of soldiers, such primitive documents would never have passed scrutiny at any military checkpoint. His headquarters staff finally dropped their objections to the certificates in order not to endanger the entire operation, but a security police detachment was posted at the assembly point to ensure its orderly conduct.
Mistrustful and cautious from bitter experience, many Neustadt inhabitants were on their way hours before the appointed time. The fortunate owners of handcarts, bicycle trailers and strong children’s scooters were envied by those having to carry their worldly goods in suitcases, rucksacks and bedding rolls. The only official assistance was shown by the Volkssturm leaders tolerantly allowing their off-duty personnel to leave their quarters to escort their families to the assembly point. Use of the adapted railway bridge was forbidden to the civilians without explanation, and they had to use the badly damaged road bridge, where the heavily laden handcarts were often hampered by the ripped decking of the narrow side strip that was still passable.
Soon hundreds of people were standing in front of the Middle School on the old chestnut tree-lined Marktplatz, where the surroundings offered little cover. A sudden bombardment would have resulted in a bloodbath, but fortunately the Soviet guns remained quiet all day long. Young messengers handed out the blank evacuation certificates, and then the crowd was left to itself again, with the women and children sitting on their baggage. Others, especially old folk on their own, wandered around restlessly in the hope of finding people they knew to group with. Responsible persons from whom information could be obtained about what was to happen were sought in vain, as were marshals whose job it was to allocate individual groups to vehicles. The Party administrators remained out of sight in their quarters only 100 metres away, providing neither staff, policemen nor Hitler Youth work teams. Certainly a sufficient number of helpers could have been deployed immediately without deflecting them from their responsibilities, even men from the fire brigade or Volkssturm staff, but nothing of the sort occurred. Instead the numerically weakest part of the civic apparatus, the NSV, had suddenly been detailed for the task that morning. When they arrived at dusk, its three staff, ‘reinforced’ by an adolescent messenger, were confronted by between 2,500 and 3,000 people. Obtaining an exact figure was neither planned nor possible; a rough assessment being estimated from the number of certificates handed out. Women were stamping and signing the certificates in the NSV office as they were run off in the Hitler Youth office on the Marktplatz.