Читать онлайн "Siege of Küstrin, 1945: Gateway to Berlin" - Tissier Tony Le - RuLit

Hermann Körner was later cleared by a denazification court and was for a long time mayor of Reinbek, near Hamburg.[12]

In all it is estimated that the defence and attempted relief of the Küstrin fortress had cost the Germans about 5,000 killed, a further 9,000 wounded evacuated to their own lines, and another 6,000, mainly wounded, taken prisoner, while the Soviets lost about 5,000 killed and 15,000 wounded.[13] The Soviets now had a bridgehead about 50 kilometres wide and 7–10 kilometres deep, the vital nodal point at Küstrin had been secured, and preparations for the next phase of operations could proceed from a far stronger base. Soviet engineers could now get on with their extensive preparations for the forthcoming Berlin operation, including the rebuilding of the heavy capacity bridges at Küstrin. However, some of these bridges were so badly damaged that a new road route had to be introduced. An aerial photograph dated 7 April 1945 shows the old bridges under repair with a new bridge across the Warthe between the damaged road and rail swing bridges, and another new bridge extending at right-angles from the Schloss across to the Island next to the Artillery Barracks.

The Luftwaffe’s Kamikaze pilots made thirty sorties against the Soviet bridges across the Oder with their Mistels and claimed to have destroyed 17 of them on 17 April, including one of the Küstrin railway bridges, for a loss of 22 pilots.[14] In fact they destroyed both the Küstrin railway bridges, as Lieutenant-General N. A. Antipenko, chief of Zhukov’s Rear Services, later wrote:

On the night of 17/18 April, just as the work on the railway bridges over the Oder and Warthe was finished, the enemy made a strong air attack and destroyed both bridges. Troops of the 29th Railway Brigade and Moskaliov’s bridge-building unit restored both bridges under continuous bombardment within a week, so that they were ready by 25 April. So the first train carrying heavy artillery was able to make its way to Berlin-Lichtenberg simultaneously with the entry of our troops into Berlin at 1800 hours on 25 April.[15]

Thus the Soviets were able to bring up the necessary supplies, ammunition and artillery, including captured German siege artillery from the Crimea firing shells weighing half a ton each, to deploy in the marshalling yards of the Schlesischer station (today’s Ostbahnhof) and pound the city centre.[16]

A young Küstrin boy passed through the town on 21 June 1945:

I arrived at the goods station in an adventurous manner in the brake cab of a goods wagon. It was said that those caught at the Oder were put into a camp, but those that got across remained unmolested, and so it seemed to be the case. A wide wooden bridge had been erected next to the destroyed Warthe Bridge. It led from the crane on the Warthe quay across to the winter harbour quay. The railway crossing at the GAGFA buildings was guarded by a Soviet Army female soldier, who had made herself comfortable under a sunshade. There were still two allotment huts standing left of the railway. The nave of the Catholic church was only slightly damaged, but the tower had been destroyed. The block of flats opposite the church had been reduced to blackened walls. The Wendrichs’ family home on the corner of Wallstrasse was almost undamaged. Voices coming from there led me to believe that someone was living there, but they might have been looters. I got away from there. All the buildings in Wallstrasse were shot-up or burnt out, the ruins partly collapsed. The law courts on the corner of Friedrichstrasse appeared, but were fully destroyed beyond the first floor, the surrounding walls of rough field stones shot through with several metres missing. The adjacent officers’ block, as we called it, is now only a flattened heap of rubble, revealing only the iron central heating boiler. Scraps of paper waved at me, a page from a children’s songbook. Only the yellow compound walls of the Senior School survived the chaos; the janitor’s house and the gymnasium were destroyed, as well as the nearby petrol station with Pritzel’s Garage. Three vast bombs had completely smashed the youth hostel area. The onetime public air raid shelter, later the Front Cinema, had taken a direct hit on its entrance. In an earthen bunker on the Wallkrone I found boxes with thousands of rounds of rifle ammunition–away from here! On the grass in front of the old prison, the area of the ‘Hohen Kavalier’, stood cars and even guns that had become unserviceable and been towed here during the fighting. Next to them was a double-decker Berlin bus that had brought the flak gun crews here in January and had been used as an anti-tank barrier on Kurzen Dammstrasse. There was no petrol for the return journey. Schulstrasse was a picture of horror. The burnt-out ruins had been ploughed through by bombs and shells, and there were the skeletons of vehicles that had been brought to this narrow street thinking that they would be safer here. The masses of debris from the buildings in Kurzen Dammstrasse had piled up into a hill. Bulldozers or other equipment had flattened it out a little so that the ‘street’ was usable again. The war memorial still stood in the middle of the Marktplatz, only lacking the eagle on top. Only a few metal scraps remained of the telephone box on the tram stop island. The words ‘Town Department of Works’ were still visible on the barely 2-metre-high wall of the Ration Office in the Danziger House. Of the town hall there was still a quite high section of the Kommandantenstrasse façade, otherwise only rubble. The skeletons of burnt-out German armoured personnel carriers stood in the street, distinguishable from the piles of rubble. The buildings here fell relatively early, well before the middle of March’s bombs and shells. The ruined landscape was depressing. Bits of walls threatening to collapse warned me not to go any further. I returned to the Neustadt, where I met a woman who was afraid to go back alone to her former home in the Altstadt, so I escorted her. The building lay next to Pritzel’s Garage, naturally only rubble, but the woman identified a few plates lying around as her property. Who knows who took this crockery out of the apartment before it collapsed. On the way back I stumbled upon a tin of jam and picked it up. My companion also found two cans–both without labels, a little eerie, but later the contents proved to be an expensive pea soup. The woman also found a frying pan, but now we could not stay any longer in this desert that was once our home.[17]

One day later the expulsion of the remaining Germans from this now Polish-administered area began, and Küstrin became Kostrzyn. The ruins of the Altstadt were stripped of suitable material to assist in the rebuilding of Warsaw and the site abandoned, but now there are plans for the possible reconstruction of the former Aldstadt in 2015.[18]

^{Annex A}

Küstrin Garrison Units, as at 22 February 1945

1. Fortress Commandant’s Staff

2. Fortress Infantry Battalion 1450

3. Panzergrenadier Replacement Battalion 50

4. 1st Battalion Armoured Troops Regiment 346

5. 2nd Battalion Armoured Troops Regiment 346

6. 3rd Battalion Armoured Troops Regiment 344

7. Engineer Replacement & Training Battalion 68

8. Territorial Engineer Battalion 513

9. 1st Battalion, Fortress Artillery Regiment 3132 (4 Batteries)

10. Artillery Replacement Battalion 39