The evacuation was more successful once the ‘corridor’ had been properly established, with the tracked vehicles coming right through to the Altstadt on the nights of 19 to 23 February, all with minimal casualties.
The Mayor of Küstrin and NSDAP County Leader Hermann Körner was also responsible for the security of the considerable supplies stored in the Neustadt. The foodstuffs in the Norddeutschen Kartoffel-Mehlfabrik (Potato Meal Factory) alone were estimated by him to be worth 3.5 million Reichsmarks. When the nightly convoys on the return journey were not required for personnel and wounded, they took these supplies with them.
The 9th Army’s eight-day-old operational orders for Küstrin were now enforced in a formal order from the staff of the XIth SS Panzer Corps. This specified that the defence of the fortress area was to be conducted in such a way as to prevent a Soviet attack on the Warthe and Oder bridges, and to hinder enemy traffic over the Oder within range of the garrison’s heavy weapons.[5]
Lieutenant Erich Bölke recalled:
I was placed under Captain Langenhahn, who was a liaison officer between the artillery and flak units and the staff, under Major Fenske of the fortress commandant’s staff. Captain Langenhahn was a soldier through and through and carried out his oath of duty until his death. He was not especially liked by the simple soldiery, because he sought to be hard and thorough in sticking to orders. I knew him for many years and can personally only speak well of him.
Mostly I was deployed as an observer on the tower of the Marienkirche in the Altstadt. I remember three special events from this time. First, a Stuka attack by part of Rudel’s squadron. Secondly, a Soviet bridge downriver on the Oder. Once I called down our heavy artillery fire on it from behind the German front line. Direct hits broke the bridge, but within hours the Russian engineers had repaired the damage. Thirdly, Major Fenske. He had been in the First World War and came from Dresden. When I was on duty as observer on the church tower of the Marienkirche he would sometimes join me. As he was a heavy smoker, I gave him my cigarettes. He would set himself at the periscope and ask: ‘Bölke, where are the cigarettes?’ and smoke one after another. Major Fenske possessed good military knowledge and also a cooperative attitude. Between ourselves, he said to me: ‘Bölke, we are not going to win the war any more. Don’t put yourself so much at risk. Let Langenhahn do it. You have to survive.’ I believe that his main thought was how to survive this engagement and come out of this shitty situation.
The fortress had two reactive mortars. They were not mobile but fired from racks. Their chief had been promoted from Second-Lieutenant to Major in the course of the events of 20 July 1944 and fell during the siege. One day a war correspondent appeared in Küstrin and wanted to take pictures of the reactive mortars being fired. He misunderstood the instructions by the officer responsible about the danger from the rocket-like tail blast, got too close and scorched his forehead. He then complained to the staff about his destroyed camera and damaged uniform.[6]
Again on 22 February it proved impossible to get all the civilians through the ‘corridor’ before the moon rose. About 150 people had to wait at Alt Bleyen manor farm, condemned to a 24-hour wait in the immediate front line, accommodated in a barn. After all that had gone before, it was hardly surprising that the fortress staff refused to take responsibility for the evacuees. Even a request for a sturdy vehicle to take the most pressing cases through that morning was not met. So, as the Party administration had grabbed many of the few remaining vehicles, someone had to go to help them. A motor vehicle courageously set off with a driver, assistant and medical orderly, laden with big milk cans filled with coffee, biscuits and cartons of sweets. The road along the dyke was slippery from hours of fine rain. The cold, wet weather appeared fortunately to have affected the alertness of the Soviet observers, for the vehicle only came under mortar fire on its return journey and then suffered only minor damage. When a warm meal had to be delivered to Alt Bleyen at noon, the vehicle became stuck and had to be pulled out by a jeep that was fortunately coming by. The Altstadt people would have to be taken by tracked vehicles from Alt Bleyen that evening before the next batch of evacuees, this time from Kietz, reached the shuttle service boarding point in the farmyard. Only about 300 people gathered in the pouring rain at the sawmill next to the Vorflut Canal that was being used as an assembly point, showing that the majority of this westernmost suburb’s inhabitants had already left with the last treks or trains.
For the first time there were no problems with the transport to Alt Bleyen, which had taken about 6,000 people in the previous three days. Those responsible within and outside Küstrin could consider themselves lucky that everything had gone so well and that neither in the previous three weeks nor during the evacuation had there been any big losses.
Nevertheless not all the civilians had left their home town. Consequently, when the Neustadt was stormed, some 500 to 600 of them fell into the hands of the Red Army. In addition, individual inhabitants kept returning to collect belongings they had left behind until 22 March, and some of these became trapped and remained in Kuhbrücken until the very end.
For lack of fresh material–even the local situation report was reduced to four and a half lines of nothing new, with not even the evacuation being mentioned–the Feste Küstrin produced just two ‘holding-out’ contributions. After six days of vain attempts to gain some operational depth in Pomerania following some local successes in Operation Sonnenwende, the attack had been broken off. Küstrin remained a distant goal.[7]
All those living in the Altstadt who had not already taken to sleeping in the cellars were driven down their cellar steps at 0500 hours. Medium calibre guns firing from the south poured a dense volume of shells into the town centre, the main target being Friedrichstrasse between the courthouse and the old army bakery. This lightly built-over terrain along the line of the filled-in fortress ditch, on which Reichsstrasse 1 ran, had hardly been troubled until now, as it was probably protected by the camouflage screen. Several 150mm infantry guns were deployed in the open on the little Rosengarten Park, not 100 metres from the dressing station in the Boys’ Senior School.
6
Kohlase [Band 4], pp. 91–2. The reactive mortars referred to were large rockets packed in wooden cases that also served as their launching racks.