There was a problem with the swing bridge. It had been swung open and so stood crossways, but this was not secure enough. A sergeant carrying a demolition charge crept out at night in his stockinged feet to the middle of the stream, prepared the bridge for demolition and ignited the charge. The required aim was achieved as the western part of the bridge flew into the air. This bridge had carried a single-track railway line from Kietzerbusch station in an almost northerly direction to Küstrin main station. Following the damage to the road bridge, it had been made usable for motor vehicles by laying railway sleepers on it. The traffic was controlled by allowing movement in one direction for half an hour at a time.
One day we received orders to erect a gallows on this road, as a sergeant was to be hanged for ‘organising’ bedclothes with his girlfriend. The penalty for looting was death. In accordance with our orders, we built a gallows on the substitute road, but the SS team responsible for carrying out the execution preferred to use an A-shaped telephone pole at the spot where the traffic waited for its turn to cross. It took the SS team 20 minutes to hang the man there where the substitute road began and the rails crossed the road leading across the Warthe to the Neustadt. Consequently we were spared having to watch the execution itself. The sergeant was stripped of his insignia and had a notice on his breast reading ‘I am hanging here because I looted’. He was right in front of our position.
Two soldiers of my own company were executed in February or March. One had ‘organised’ a typewriter from a private house, which counted as plundering. The other, in deadly fear, had shot himself in the arm in an effort to get into the relative safety of a hospital, but such self-mutilation also merited the death sentence. The doctor bandaged the wound, which possibly saved his life, and then reported in accordance with orders that he had found traces of powder in the wound. This report cost the man his life. He was not even eighteen years old.[8]
The Neustadt enjoyed no peace, even during the night. By the morning of 8 March the front lines were so close that both sides reacted nervously to the slightest movement. Where the Berlin railway line crossed Plantagenstrasse leading into the town centre, panic firing had broken out whenever Soviet uniforms were thought to have been seen through the smoke of the burning buildings between the flames and bursting shells. The wreck of a Sherman tank shot up on 31 January was mistaken for a tank attack. It took considerable time before it was established that one group had fired at another while it was redeploying and was unfamiliar with the lie of the front line and the general situation. Fortunately there were no casualties.
The 32nd Rifle Corps resumed its attack on the Neustadt at 0900 hours, supporting the infantry with heavy tanks and flame-throwers.
Renewed Soviet air attacks kept the battered flak forces busy. The flak units tried to improve their effectiveness by coordinating the fire of those of their weapons that were still intact, but the communications could either not be repaired fast enough or fell victim yet again to the first bombs. Coordinated fire was now out of the question. The individual positions, even the individual guns, were now firing independently ‘on sight’.
Bombs followed the shells and then early in the afternoon came the infantry attack. Unexpectedly, it developed first on the eastern edge of the Neustadt on either side of the railway line to Landsberg, where the ground was favourable to the defence. In fighting that lasted more than two hours the Soviet troops advanced as far as the loading ramp south of the main track to the Lagardes Mühlen housing estate, but were stopped there under fire from the strongpoint developed out of the Engineer Barracks. Further north on the approaches to the goods station and water works the front line remained practically unchanged and the garrison was able to hold the line of the town boundary.
The attack by the main forces had yet to come. A battalion-sized counterattack to clear the wedge forwards from Alt Drewitz failed, and when the real storm broke at midday from the woods on either side of the Stettin railway line, the German forward lines were overrun within a couple of hours. On the whole the resistance stiffened when bitter fighting started in the densely built-up area. The axis Infantry Barracks–Neues Werke bounding the breach to the east was not attacked energetically, but the Soviet forces pushing forward from Alt Drewitz quickly overran the approaches to the partly burning industrial complex along the Warthe. The prominent installations of the Cellulose Factory, Potato Meal Factory and Rütges Werke, although already in ruins, offered good cover possibilities and screened the direct approaches to the town and the bridges. The 1900 hours report to Corps said that the Cellulose Factory was still holding out, but shortly afterwards that installation fell.
Most of the cellars in the middle of the town had survived destruction. They were now interconnected by breaches in the cellar walls, and those who reached them could feel relatively secure. Some ended their senseless flight here, falling on a primitive air raid shelter bed and staying there, while others moved on after a short rest. No one bothered about them any more. SS patrols and the Feldgendarmerie dared not go so far forwards in this underground labyrinth any more. The fortress commandant had already let slip his control and influence over the course of events and Colonel Walter, the sector commander, appears to have lost control that evening. He could not prevent his main forces in the north-eastern part of the town from reaching the bridges any longer. Reinefarth wanted, far too late, to abandon the little bridgeheads around the crossings and save at least some of the troops now threatened with destruction, but Corps forbade him this step, in the useless hope that the 6,000 men in the Neustadt could, even in a tighter position, simply continue to withstand the Soviet pressure. The contested positions were overrun by the attackers late that evening and the Germans were obliged to blow the bridges across the Warthe, leaving the helpless survivors of the Neustadt garrison isolated.[9]
Officer Cadet Karl-Heinz Peters was a witness to these events:
On the evening of 8 March I was sentry on the middle Warthe bridge. Its centre section was swung aside. Russians suddenly appeared in the darkness on the part of the bridge opposite. The glowing face of a soldier lit by the moon appeared in my carbine sights. But I could not shoot him, firing a warning shot instead. Shortly afterwards I was posted with a railway sapper directly on the Warthe road bridge. The sapper was withdrawn that same night and I was left completely alone with our machine-gun team exactly 100 metres behind me. It also had to cover the flooded land up to the Sonnenburger Chaussee and could not keep observation on the bridge.
All night of 8/9 March I held on to a German bridgehead in front of the road bridge. Then it was abandoned and the bridge blown. From the other bank I could hear busy vehicle movement and also tank engines.[10]
SS-Grenadier Oscar Jessen was one of the lucky few that escaped over the bridge:
The main enemy attack began at the beginning of March with a strong artillery preparation. When it quietened down again, we got up and moved our gun to a new position, which I believe was already in the Neustadt. At night the ‘Sewing Machines’ flew over and threw their bombs at us. We now lay with comrades of another unit, who had survived the bombardment together. We could hear sounds of battle coming from the Cellulose Factory.