On the afternoon of the day we broke through, German sentries saw the punishment of two Russian soldiers at gunpoint, presumably the two that three of us had escaped from that morning.
Wearing only socks on my feet, next morning I was sent to the main dressing station at Wriezen with badly swollen feet and a skin infection. From there I went to the field hospital for lightly wounded at Tiefensee, near Strausberg, and thus became separated from my sapper comrades.[25]
Chapter Nine
Assault on the Altstadt
The fall of the Neustadt now led to the fate of the Altstadt and the Küstrin Fortress being decided on the flat, soggy plain of the Oderbruch.
On 13 March Marshal Zhukov issued fresh orders for the reduction of the Küstrin Fortress and the unification of his bridgeheads, just as the 32nd Rifle Corps of General Berzarin’s 5th Shock Army was attacking the Küstrin-Altstadt garrison in conjunction with another attack by the 4th Guards Rifle Corps of General Chuikov’s 8th Guards Army from Kietz. Neither of these attacks succeeded, and the plans for this operation had to be reviewed once more. The urgency of Zhukov’s orders showed that he was not too involved with the East Pomeranian operation or with the operational control of his main forces to look ahead to the earliest resumption of the main operation on Berlin.
The 5th Shock Army was now ordered to use two reinforced rifle divisions in a main attack on Golzow, with a subsidiary attack from the Alt Bleyen area on Gorgast. The stated aim was to break through the German defences in the Genschmar/Alt Bleyen sector, take the area Genschmar/Golzow and Kuhbrücken-Vorstadt, seize the 16.3 and 10.3 elevations, but not Golzow itself, and then go over to the defensive.
The 8th Guards Army, also using two reinforced rifle divisions, was ordered to break through the defences in a north-westerly direction, complete the taking of Kietz, and then go over to the defensive in the area Golzow/Alt Tucheband/Hathenow. The main attack was to be conducted towards Golzow with a subsidiary attack on Kietz as far as the Vorflut Canal.
The operation thus planned involved these two armies using only part of their resources, while their main forces had the task of defending the existing bridgeheads and of tying down the German troops with diversionary attacks by small groups. Close coordination between these two armies, and the supporting elements of the 16th Air Army, was essential if the plan was to succeed, for it was appreciated that the fortress was well favoured with natural obstacles, which would make it extremely difficult to overcome.
The 5th Shock Army picked the 32nd Rifle Corps, which in turn picked the 60th Guards and 295th Rifle Divisions, for the main thrust. The 1373rd Rifle Regiment of the 416th Rifle Division was tasked with the subsidiary thrust, while the other two regiments of that division were to secure the banks of the Warthe opposite the fortress.
The 8th Guards Army detailed the 4th Guards Rifle Corps, whose 47th and 57th Guards Rifle Divisions would be used for the main assault. Two regiments of the 35th Guards Rifle Division would be used for the subsidiary thrust, while its third regiment would secure the Oder embankment.[1]
The Küstrin garrison had lost more than half its complement, most of its artillery pieces and an incalculable amount of ammunition and supplies. No replacement of personnel or heavy weapons in worthwhile numbers could be expected. Supplies had already been minimal during the preceding weeks and never balanced the expenditure, for the forming of a stable front in the Oderbruch opposite the threatening bridgeheads had received priority.
In Küstrin itself a decimated garrison could still hold a relatively useful position on the Oder, even with its modest equipment, by blocking the nearest river crossing places and the only east–west railway on the whole front. The nightly supply convoys guaranteed an adequate delivery of life-sustaining items and kept the numbers in the main dressing station down to an acceptable level. As long as the ‘corridor’ remained open and convoys could continue to operate there was no need to fear a crisis in food and ammunition supplies.
However, the fortress area was now reduced to the Altstadt in its encompassing peninsula with the remains of the old bastion-enclosed town centre–a piece of land about 2 kilometres long but only 800 metres wide at its widest point between the Oder and Warthe rivers–as well as the Island of similar size to the west formed between the Oder and the Vorflut Canal. The Island contained the Altstadt railway station, the Artillery Barracks, an abattoir and a brewery, but relatively few houses. Deeply flooded scrubland and meadows covered wide expanses of the Altstadt peninsula known as the Gorin in the north and the Island in the south. This was a difficult area for the garrison, for only two or three spades down one struck groundwater and so no effective trenches or foxholes could be dug, but the attacker was equally disadvantaged from lack of cover. Consequently no serious attempts had been made to cross here until now.
The front around the fortress had now consolidated on this new line. A German attack on Kietz from the north in regimental strength achieved little. Enemy reconnaissance and assault troops kept the squeezed-in garrison busy every day. One night some Soviet scouts in rubber dinghies came down the Oder and were first spotted opposite the Altstadt walls, coming under fire from both banks.
Tied down, the garrison was being subjected to wearing artillery bombardments. The intensity and frequency of air attacks depended upon the weather and varying target priorities along the whole middle Oder front, but even individual aircraft almost always found a target within the narrow fortress territory. Everywhere shells of German origin were being fired, the large number found in the fortress leading to the depressing realisation that they could not have come from a German long-range battery on the Seelow Heights, but had been fired from Soviet guns. In fact the 8th Guards Army had collected up all the guns and ammunition captured on the way from Posen to the Oder and some 65,000 captured German shells of 105mm and 150mm calibre were used in the fighting for the bridgehead south of Küstrin.
When the bombardment lifted in the evenings or occasionally died away, men climbed up into the open by the dim glimmer of shaded pocket torches to stand in line at the water pumps or to gather sandbags from burnt-out or collapsed buildings to reinforce the entrances and windows of their own bunkers. In some places, such as at the town hall, the cellar doors were barricaded with squashed clarified butter cartons taken from destroyed stores, as they had proved good at stopping bullets and shrapnel.
Stores not required by the garrison were taken to Seelow by the nightly convoys. Even some goods that had been stored by Neustadt firms in the supposedly bombproof Altstadt and subsequently damaged were taken away by the halftracks. Off-duty Volkssturm men stuffed boxes full of shoes, clothing, suits, coats, etc. into sacks for this purpose.
However, the most important task for the convoy’s journeys was the removal of the wounded. Losses and damage had made the lack of beds, medical equipment and medicines even worse. Some of the forward dressing stations had already fallen. A former Luftwaffe medical depot in the Neustadt that the fortress had taken over went up in flames. Consequently, with a daily increasing proportion of casualties, the seriously wounded had a lesser chance of being evacuated, and with this in mind, in the middle of the month the combat units of the Volkssturm and the Hitler Youth were moved out of the railway offices on the Marktplatz to make room for them.
1
Brückl, p. 15 [Simon, p. 44]. The only elevation of 16.3 metres in the area is a hillock within the Kalenziger Wiesen, giving an actual elevation of about 7.3 metres above the surrounding area. This was already occupied by the 60th Guards Rifle Division.