An especially zealous unit commander spoilt his men’s off-duty time that evening by making them listen to Goebbels’s speech on the current situation over the communal radio. ‘The war is like a marathon,’ said the Propaganda Minister. ‘Every runner experiences a weak moment on the way and only he who overcomes it reaches the goal as winner. Since the time of Frederick the Great…’ and so on. Every reluctant listener comforted himself with the fact that every sermon has to end sometime. Finally the day brought something to celebrate: the first post arrived, if only for a few lucky ones. Meanwhile the whole garrison had been allocated the number 18 203, with different letters signifying individual units.[16]
In late February and early March the commandant ordered all the members of the Hitler Youth to leave the fortress. The boys had volunteered to assist with the defence of their home town but belonged to no military unit and were unarmed. They had served as runners, helped to carry the wounded and assisted in the evacuation of people and animals, as well as carrying food and supplies from the Neustadt to the Altstadt, or the hinterland. They were officially evacuated because they were under 16, but also to spare them the possibility of capture by the Russians. The remaining men were members of the Volkssturm, the fire brigade or the police, doctors and nursing staff, duty personnel of important services and establishments, such as the water works, gas works, sewage farm, electricity supply and cemeteries, and an emergency administration as well as a small NSDAP county staff.[17]
In a letter written to his wife at about this time, Major Werner Falckenberg wrote:
The focus of attention is on the Bienenhof. An officer commanding there considers Monte Cassino, where he was from the beginning until it was abandoned, as child’s play in comparison to what our men at the Bienenhof have to put up with! Perhaps a bit overstated, but it is certainly violent.
From Russian field post letters taken by us from them, it seems that the Russians have had enough of the war. Further, they have become anxious, for they write that they have come against an especially strong position that they cannot do anything about. They can be hit by a bullet at any moment!
Things are still all right for us now that I know where you are! The rations are very good. We also have water now, only the power has given up. Of course it does not come from main grid any more, but from one of the big plants. Yesterday a few cables were hit but are now working again.[18]
The new month of March arrived unkindly. Stiff winds whipped rain showers through the damaged streets. Bunker stoves emitted smoke and sparks. The Neustadt and Kietz lay under heavy shellfire from early in the morning, as did the Warthe bridges. Then ground-attack aircraft appeared and, after a long time, a couple of German fighters. The front line remained relatively quiet.
In Küstrin the Party officials were hoping to track down the last civilians with orders to report in. They tempted and threatened in order to achieve their aim. They tempted with the production of a unique identity card and threatened defaulters with punishment by the Standing Court. This was the third action of its kind within a few weeks, owing to the lack of an effective population census or labour force registration system.
The numbers appearing at the reporting centre were meagre, but the original purpose of giving these people a shock was essentially achieved on the evening of 1 March. About 150 people found themselves on the convoy, including also the last large emergency accommodation group that had been sheltering in a Neustadt brewery cellar until then. While they waited thickly wrapped for the night journey in the entrance to the Boys’ Middle School and in the hallways of neighbouring buildings, the roar of two mighty explosions thundered over the town. No fires indicated the direction and no one knew what had caused them.[19]
These mysterious explosions, the blast from which had broken windows in various places, gave rise to numerous avenues of speculation on 2 March. As no one had really reliable information, all kinds of suspicions arose. One idea was that frogmen had blown the Soviet underwater bridge north of Küstrin. That such an attempt had been made was possible, but could not explain the proximity of the explosions to the town. And any success would surely have been mentioned in the local newspaper, successes being so rare that such an opportunity would not have been missed.
In one of the rare exchanges of fire of these days, a young Polish girl was killed by a shell splinter. She left behind a baby only a few months old that she had kept in the seclusion of her place of work, a market garden in Neu Bleyen. With the death of her mother, the child now became an outlaw according to the establishment. She was handed over by soldiers to the police and so became an official case. The local Gestapo chief ordered the ‘thing’ to be shot, but his subordinates did not want to dirty their hands at this last minute. They knew that word would soon leak out, and thus a ‘silent execution’ would not be possible. Soon concern about the planned murder was raised in the adjacent Party offices. In view of this, the Gestapo chief withdrew his order without expressly rescinding it. The officials could breathe again, having been spared the decision between committing a crime and open disobedience, but someone had to be responsible for the child. The hundred-odd foreign forced labourers that had been retained in Küstrin to work on the fortifications were due to be moved later that evening under SD escort, so the child was given to a Polish woman. What would happen when she appeared at the next camp with a child that was not entered on her papers, nobody bothered about. They had done their ‘best’ and someone had even surreptitiously slipped a 100-Mark note under the pram blanket.[20]
The leading article in the Feste Küstrin on 3 March read:
Anyone who deserts now will not be saving his life… We must free ourselves from all peacetime ideas to pursue this war. We have done everything to raise the soldier from the mass of the people as a warrior. We have simplified his life. He gets even more to eat than has to be worked hard for at home. We have made separation from their families back home easier with generous welfare measures. Now is the time for soldiers to show themselves worthy of their homeland…If we don’t do it, it will be all over for us.
This rallying call broke like a thunderstorm on the nerves of an already anxious garrison. The local situation report read: ‘Some heavy weapons…damaged the Soviet bridge at Kalenzig.’ The same day the news-sheet reported a Luftwaffe attack on the Oder–Warthe bend: ‘Despite an unusually heavy flak concentration in this area, and permanent defensive flights by Bolshevik fighter aircraft, two almost completed bridges over the Oder were destroyed by bombs. This success is significant, for the Soviets possess no complete bridges in this sector.’
In a letter to his wife that day Major Falckenberg said that in the evening he had made a reconnaissance of the Gorin (the northern tip of the peninsula on which the Altstadt stood) and that he had been fired on by Soviet machine-gunners already installed there.[21]
‘Today we realise that all that has happened until now was just a prelude. Our main task lies ahead of us’: so one read in the article ‘A month of Fortress Küstrin’, contained in the Sunday issue of the newspaper on 4 March. It went on: