The Siege of Kustrin, 1945

Gateway to Berlin

Tony Le Tissier

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781848845534
• eBook ISBN: 9781848846975
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

The acclaimed WWII historian and author of Race to the Reichstag vividly chronicles the preliminary battle that opened the Red Army's path to Berlin.
In January of 1945, the arrival of Soviet troops at the garrison town of Küstrin came as a tremendous shock to the German High Command. The Soviets were now only fifty miles from Berlin itself. Before they could advance on the capital, the Red Army needed the vital road and rail bridges passing through Küstrin. A combination of flooding and strategic blunders resulted in a sixty-day siege by two Soviet armies which totally destroyed the town.
The delay in the Soviet advance gave the Germans time to consolidate the defenses shielding Berlin. Despite Hitler's orders to fight to the last bullet, the Küstrin garrison commander and a thousand defenders managed a dramatic break-out to the German lines. The protracted siege had an appalling human cost, with thousands of lives lost on both sides and many more wounded. With painstaking research and eyewitness testimony, Tony Le Tissier bring the story of the siege to life.

Chapter One

The Development of a Fortress

Küstrin began as a lucrative customs post at the junction of the Warthe and Oder rivers, which remained important communications routes until the Oder became part of the revised east German boundary at the conclusion of the Second World War in 1945 and all river traffic came to a standstill.

The town was originally known as Cüstrin and was first mentioned in official records in 1232 when it was entrusted until 1262 to the Knights Templar, who reinforced the existing castle there and established a market. In 1397 the town was pawned to the Knights of St John and was then sold in 1402 to the German Order of Knights, who constructed the first bridge across the Oder there, built a castle to protect it and occupied the castle with a garrison of armed knights. In 1455 the German Order sold the town to the Markgraf Albrecht von Hohenzollern, in whose family’s hands the town was to remain until the abdication of the Kaiser in 1918.

Markgraf Hans von Hohenzollern built the new Schloss (fortified palace) between 1535 and 1537, and then had the fortress that is still recognisable today constructed by the engineer Giromella, with its four corner bastions (König, Königin, Kronprinzessin and Philipp) and the central northern bastion (Kronprinz, or Hohen Kavalier).

When King Gustav Adolf of Sweden conquered the Mark Brandenburg in 1631, he also acquired Küstrin. The Swedes reinforced the fortress and added the Albrecht and August Wilhelm ravelins, as well as two lunettes to the Oder bridgehead. (The remains of the upriver lunette were still visible on 1945 aerial photographs.) The Swedish king was killed at the battle of Lützen in 1632 and three years later the Mark Brandenburg was back in Prussian hands.

On 5 September 1730 Crown Prince Friedrich (later King Frederick the Great) was brought to the fortress under guard with his companion Second-Lieutenant von Katte, having been caught while trying to desert from his father’s army. He was incarcerated in the Schloss, from where he was later obliged to watch the beheading of von Katte, and remained imprisoned there until 26 February 1732.

The Russian siege of August 1758

The siege lasted from 14 to22 August 1758, when Frederick the Great attacked the Russian army from the rear and defeated it at the battle of Kutzdorf. The planis taken from the volume Neues Kriegstheater oder Sammlung der merkwürdigsten Begebenheiten des gegenwärtigen Krieges in Deutschland (Leipzig, 1758).

Key:

A. The town and fortress of Küstrin

B. Russian artillery and mortar batteries that set fire to the town on 22 August 1758

C. Advanced Russian corps besieging the town

D. The camp of the imperial Russian troops under Field Marshal Graf von Fermor

Küstrin was first besieged by the Russians in 1758 during the Seven Years’ War, as a result of which the town was burnt to the ground. Frederick ordered the immediate reconstruction of the town and within ten days of the fire defeated the Russians at the battle of Zorndorf nearby. That same year work was begun on the Friedrich-Wilhelm Canal; when it was finished in 1787 it provided a new outlet for the Warthe into the Oder north of the town.

In 1806 the Prussian army was defeated by Napoleon at the battles of Jena and Auerstädt. The fortress at Küstrin was subsequently surrendered to the French, who proceeded to reinforce the defences. The fortress was besieged again by the Russians from March to July 1813, and then by the Prussian Landwehr, to whom the French garrison capitulated in March the following year. The Schloss then became a barracks.

In 1817 the course of the Warthe where it joined the Oder southeast of the fortress was blocked, and work was begun on the Sonnenburger Chaussee six years later. The Oder-Vorflut Canal was constructed in 1832 to take the strain off the town’s bridges during the annual floods, being designed with a dam across it so that the water could only flow across it once it reached a certain level, while ensuring the busy navigation of the Oder throughout the summer. In the 1850s the resulting ‘Island’ was provided with Lunettes A and B to cover the upstream Oder approaches, and Lunettes C and D to guard the road bridge across the canal from the west bank; of these, only Lunettes B and D still survived in 1945. Only the moat of Lunette A remained and C had been completely removed and filled in. However, the military remained conscious of the importance of the annual flooding of the Warthebruch in particular as a defensive measure.

The first railways arrived with the construction of the Küstrin–Landsberg–Kreuz line in 1856–7, after which the town soon became an important railway junction, but the connection to Berlin was not effected until 1867, when the Oder bridgehead fortifications were removed to make way for the Altstadt station. The two-level Neustadt station was built in 1874–6, when new lines linked Küstrin with Stettin on the Baltic and Breslau in Upper Silesia. In 1885 the Küstrin–Stargard railway line was opened, and in 1896 the Küstrin–Sonnenburg line, the same year that the line to Berlin was doubled. A further connection was made in 1884 with a line to Neudamm. Küstrin now formed the nodal point for two important express train lines running east to west and north to south, as well as being the start point for the other lines. The town had four railway stations: the main station in the Neustadt, Küstrin-Altstadt on the Island, Küstrin-Kietz and Kietzerbusch, which was little more than a halt.

This was also a time of military expansion. The Neues Werke fort was built adjacent to the Neustadt railway station in 1863–72, and the Hohen Kavalier was adapted to take heavy guns. Following the Franco-German War of 1870–1, an attempt was made to preserve the 300-year-old fortifications at the mouth of the Warthe, despite the introduction of longer-ranged guns using Alfred Nobel’s far more powerful explosives than hitherto, and outer forts were constructed at a distance of 5 to 10 kilometres east of the Oder at Zorndorf, Tschernow and Säpzig, and to the west at Gorgast. However, presumably as a security measure, none of these external works was shown on the official maps of this area.

Then in 1902–3 the new Artillery Barracks were built on the Island opposite the Altstadt railway station, and in 1913 barracks for an engineer battalion were constructed on Warnicker Strasse. The dwindling defensive value of the medieval citadel could only have been welcome to the citizens, hemmed in as they were by the walls and ditches. After years of negotiation the town managed to obtain a considerable amount of the fortress property from the state in order to be able to lower the walls and fill in the ditches. The First World War delayed this process but, none the less, most of the works fell into civilian use, with a casemate becoming the town museum, one lunette a home to a canoe club and another a youth hostel. Eventually, in 1930, part of the Hohen Kavalier was demolished together with the northern ramparts, allowing the improvement of the stretch of main road (Reichsstrasse 1) running through the Altstadt between the Oder and Warthe bridges.¹

Another wave of military construction began under the Nazi government with the provision of a large supply depot and bakery. New barracks, later named ‘von Stülpnagel’, were built to accommodate an infantry regiment on Landsberger Strasse, the engineer barracks were extended, and a garrison hospital was constructed on Warnicker Strasse nearby.

From the invasion of Poland in August 1939 onwards the town became an important transit centre for the war in the east, but was spared immediate involvement in the war until January 1945. Only twice were bombs dropped here during the night raids on Berlin, landing on the outskirts without causing any noticeable damage. Right at the beginning of the air war an apparently inadequately blacked-out farmhouse off the Sonnenburger Chaussee had attracted attention and next day the curious could see deep craters scattered over the fields nearby. Then in 1941 raiders spotted the chimneys of the Cellulose Factory sticking up above the fog bank, but only the factory toilets and washrooms were hit.

The apparent lack of interest shown by the staffs of the Anglo-American air forces in the vulnerable communications nodal point of Küstrin–five large and three smaller railway and road bridges spanning the Oder, Warthe and Vorflut Canal in a so-called multi-level railway station, a rare design enabling the important west–east (Berlin–Königsberg/East Prussia) line to cross over the north–south (Stettin–Breslau) line–simplified the requirement for effective antiaircraft defence.

For a while during the opening stages of the war heavy flak batteries were deployed in the open fields near Manschnow on the road to Seelow as part of the Berlin defences. Later the flak defences were reduced to the garrison’s machine-gun troops, who were stationed at night at various points near the bridges. Luckily for the place and its inhabitants, the effectiveness of these old, water-cooled weapons was never put to the test, but the pointless firing of reconditioned tracer bullets into the night sky occurred whenever the sound of an aircraft engine could be heard, however far off.

There was also a Home-Flak battery manned by schoolboys and elderly men. Its 20mm cannon were stationed at the river crossing points, mainly on hastily assembled metal scaffolding towers, but also on wooden platforms on school and factory roofs near the Oder bridges. There were also some small searchlights. In daytime the gun crews either went to work or to school, taking it in turns to assemble in the evenings at the provisional accommodation at these positions. The same applied to the whole troop whenever there was an air raid alert. However, their weapons never fired a live round in anger. Two or three times they fired at a target pulled by a single-engined Ju W 34 at a reasonable height with practice ammunition. The gun crews’ duty time was mainly taken up with theoretical instruction, preparatory exercises and even with drill conducted by a small group of regular Luftwaffe personnel. These guns were unable to reach the Anglo-American bomber fleets that attacked Berlin from 1944 onwards, using the eastward-running railway as a guide to the Oder before turning north for the Baltic, and eventually they were dismantled at the beginning of 1945.²

The Nazi influence on the town could be seen in the renaming of streets after Nazi heroes. Brückenstrasse and that part of Zorndorfer Strasse between the Stern and the Warthe river was renamed Adolf-Hitler-Strasse, Drewitzer Oberweg in the Neustadt became Schlageterstrasse, while the section of Reichsstrasse 1 running through Kietz became Horst-Wessel-Strasse. The town mayor, Hermann Körner, also doubled as Kreisleiter or District Party Leader, his immediate superior being the Gauleiter of Brandenburg, Emil Stürtz, whose offices were in Berlin, although Berlin itself had its own Gauleiter, Josef Goebbels. Next in the Party chain of command was Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, Hitler’s head of chancellery, to whom Körner would duly report.

Refugees began arriving in the town by train on 20 January. The first ones arrived on scheduled trains and mainly with a destination in mind. Some were evacuees from Berlin, fleeing from the devastating air raids there, and hoping for emergency accommodation with someone they knew. Then there were the families of civil servants and lower ranking Nazi officials from the Warthegau (the senior ones returned by motorcar). Then there were those who had not waited for orders to evacuate or to join the Volkssturm. These people were tired and irritable from constantly delayed journeys in cold and overfilled trains, but in this they did not differ much from other railway passengers in Germany in those days. Their preparations for the journey had clearly not been made in haste, for they wore suitable clothing and the belongings they brought with them were manageable and solidly packed, ready for frequent alighting from the trains. The assistance they needed from the improvised services at the railway stations, apart from the free distribution of refreshments for the journey, was very little. Those who had not managed to get aboard a passing train nearly always stayed in the station waiting rooms. The danger of missing the next connection to the west was far less there than in the emergency accommodation provided outside the station.

But this picture soon changed. At first there were a few individuals, then small family groups, then the numbers began to grow until the carriages arrived filled to the last inch. Now they were having to sacrifice some of their luggage in the fight to obtain a place on a train. Adherence to train schedules was no longer the norm. Fast and express trains were being slowed down throughout the whole country, and passenger trains could only be used without special permits for journeys of up to 75 kilometres. Shuttle services arrived irregularly, having been hurriedly assembled somewhere. Almost all the trains finished their journeys at Küstrin and were emptied there, a fact which was accepted without protest by the exhausted travellers. There were stories of deeply snowed-under roads with wearying waits at train stops on branch lines and, often enough, of having to walk on to the next big station. At Küstrin, there was at least the chance of spending a night in a heated room, resting on bundles of straw for a few hours. The classrooms to which they were taken could not be illuminated as there was no blackout, but bread and coffee were handed out in the corridors. Those who had lost family members could have the names noted down to be called out at the other locations offering shelter.

As late as Sunday, 28 January 1945 it seemed that life in the town was going on as normal. The local children were enjoying themselves with toboggans and skates, paying little attention to their parents’ warnings to remain within call. No one could say whether the factories and businesses would reopen after the weekend break. But then the first treks began arriving in the town, having left distant villages several days ago. The people and their animals were exhausted. The horses were tended to in the streets wherever shelter from the wind could be found, and the refugees asked at the houses for warm drinks for their children. The columns then moved on. Others wanted to stay at least one night under a proper roof. Some had given up completely, their horses having been overwhelmed by the snowdrifts during the last stage; often their wagons could only move on when everyone got off, removing the heaviest loads until the wheels could get a firm grip on the ground. After three or four such incidents, boxes and baskets were often left behind, for it was not worth saving them if one was going on by train.

Until this point individual cases had been distinguishable in the great passing stream, and some compassion had been shown according to the degree of need, but now all those arriving in open railway wagons were in the same lowest state of misery. It took a long time for the trains to be loaded, but things calmed down a little when the trains moved off with shapelessly bundled figures huddled together, packed on the bare floors of the wagons. Here and there a piece of sailcloth or even a carpet provided some basic shelter from the cutting cold. The overcoats of those who had found places inside protected them from the shower of sparks coming from the engine.

Two wagons in which typhus had broken out were detached and medical orderlies carried off a corpse on a stretcher. Several women and children were admitted to hospital with frostbite. The others remained incapable of doing anything, sitting on the platform until they were led away, several forgetting their baggage.

All the accommodation near the station was filled to capacity and more. Even the seats in the cinemas had been removed to provide space. Two schools in the Altstadt had also been made available, but that involved a 1.5 kilometre walk as there was no transport available. No one had thought of providing an adequate aid service or making proper arrangements when this evacuation began. Because of the propaganda put out by the government, the lower level civil servants were unaware of the extent of the approaching avalanche. Consequently only the relatively limited resources deployed for the reception of the evacuee trains from Berlin in the late summer of 1943, providing a brief stop for refreshments, had been implemented. Now considerable improvisation, mainly using helpful members of such organisations as the German Red Cross, the Frauenschaft (Mothers’ Union) and Jungvolk (junior branch of the Hitler Youth), had become necessary for the preparation of sandwiches and hot drinks, laying down straw in classrooms for overnight accommodation and providing medical care for the worst cases.

The boys served as guides to the emergency accommodation scattered all over the town, carrying baggage on thei...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• List of Maps
• 1. The Development of a Fortress
• 2. The Vistula–Oder Operation
• 3. Defence Preparations
• 4. The Russians Are Here!
• 5. The Siege Begins
• 6. The Russians Close In
• 7. Evacuation
• 8. Assault on the Neustadt
• 9. Assault on the Altstadt
• 10. Breakout
• 11. Consequences
• Annex A: Küstrin Garrison Units, as at 22 February 1945
• Annex B: Reinefart’s Report on the Fall of Küstrin Fortress and the Breakout of the Surviving Garrison
• Annex C: Kreisleiter Körner’s Report
• Notes
• Bibliography