The Last Panther - Slaughter of the Reich - The Halbe Kessel 1945

by Wolfgang Faust

  ‘Don’t light a cigarette, my friends, or you’re all finished.’

  A Luftwaffe pilot squatted beside us, grinning. He was middle-aged, and he looked exhausted, with hollow cheeks and thin hair oiled over a balding skull. His flying boots were perfectly polished, but his moustache was yellow with nicotine. He gave us an account of how he had brought the plane down in an emergency landing on the pasture, leaking the precious jet fuel that was more valuable to the Reich than gold.

  ‘But how shall I get to the West now?’ he murmured. ‘Everything is lost. Perhaps I shall have a cigarette anyway, when you are safely gone.’

  We shook hands with him, eager to clasp the hand of a legend. Our complaints, our bitter jokes about the Luftwaffe were forgotten for a minute, as we watched the superb aircraft being pulled into the shadow of the elm trees, where it was to be stored, the pilot told us, until it could somehow be returned to service. As we left the thicket, the lowing of the oxen began, a sound that I recognised as the beasts of burden being unyoked from their load.

  A minute after that, the whole corner of the forest behind us was lit up, and we turned to see a colossal orange fireball climbing into the air above the trees. The fireball was dripping with burning fuel, rolling over as it rose, so hot that it burned the mist from the treetops for hundreds of metres around. The farm boy who had driven the oxen came running after us, shouting hysterically.

  ‘He lit a cigarette, the fool! As if he wanted to die.’

  Slowly, these scenes and many others fell behind us, and the sounds of fighting from the perimeter became more distant. Our panzer creaked and rattled at walking pace through a smokescreen, our eyes streaming with tears which we had not shed in the battles, and entered a zone which appeared to be organised in some manner of discipline.

  Kettenhund men were directing the traffic onward, and the improvised defences and emplacements gave way to properly constructed ditches and trenches. The troops here were a mixture of the completely fresh and the exhausted, and the equipment likewise was both new and old. A number of immaculate PAK guns, their wheels barely muddy, were manned by gunners who resembled scarecrows, thin and ragged. A unit of Hitler Youth troops, in clean uniforms and recent haircuts, were manning a defence point that consisted of an old Panzer III with no wheels or tracks, standing in a mound of barbed wire. The troops were from a great variety of units and regiments, including armed police and Volkssturm men.

  Amazingly, there were field kitchens too, giving a ladleful of hot soup to anyone, soldier or civilian, who passed. I ate my ration on the Panther’s rear deck, leaning on the turret, surrounded by wounded men and children. The engine smoke coated us with grime, and the fumes made us nauseous, but we were properly inside the Twelfth Army sector, heading for the Elbe.

  As we rolled past a group of soldiers clustered around an armoured car, one of them turned to us and shouted something. I didn’t catch it, but some of the children heard, and began to tug my sleeve.

  ‘Feldwebel?’

  ‘What is it, lad?’

  ‘The Fuhrer is dead now.’

  We stopped at the next group of troops and listened to their radio set for a few minutes. It announced that the Adolf Hitler had died in the fight for Berlin, only thirty kilometres to the North of us. The war continued all the same, in the hope of a final victory. Some women were weeping, and some of the troops stood around, talking openly of suicide. I felt little – except for the pain in my back wound, for which I took the last of my drugs.

  *

  The Twelfth Army sector around Brandenburg in front of the Elbe was a landscape of destruction and constant movement. The perimeter was being held by the remnants of the Twelfth and the escaped Ninth Armies, but the whole zone was being pressed heavily by the Reds – except for the Elbe itself on the Western boundary, which faced the silent, unmoving Americans on their bank. Vast columns of vehicles and people were making their way across the rolling countryside towards the river. The Reds controlled the sky despite our Flak, and their Jabos came over frequently, strafing the columns, the buildings and the open land. We knew that if the Russians wanted to, they could bomb the sector into dust. They were holding back, waiting for the end of the war, and perhaps seeking to maximise their catch of humanity. Leaflets cascaded down from the sky, urging everyone in the sector to remain static and stop resisting the advance of the Red Army.

  Hitler is dead. Berlin has surrendered. The war has no logic and it must end now.

  In addition, voices spoke to us through loudspeakers amplified at incredibly high volume. These were the voices of Seydlitz officers, and the warm spring breeze carried them for kilometres across the landscape. The words were indistinct, but we caught Surrender, Peace, Life, Goodwill and a few others. We listened to this, and the drone of the aircraft overhead, as we joined a massive flood of people heading towards the river.

  It was rare now to see armed troops; most had thrown away their weapons, and they walked with hands in their pockets or supporting their backpacks. Most epaulettes and other signs of rank had been removed from their uniforms, and the meadows were scattered with badges, caps and jackboots. Men’s civilian clothing was prized now, and many men who wore the trousers and shirt of farm workers had the bearing of recent professional soldiers. Schnapps and other alcohol was in ample supply, and many people were to be seen lying drunk beside the road, desensitised to whatever they had witnessed and whatever fears possessed them.

  The fields and roadsides were lined with abandoned vehicles, both mechanised and horse-drawn. There were a few panzers among the trucks, Kubelwagens and cars, but it seemed that most armoured vehicles had been left behind in the Kessel and the other battle zone. Our Panther was the only one of its type that we saw, and it was close to dying under us. At a junction in the roads, a huge crater barred the way to heavy vehicles, and the foot traffic crossed on a wooden bridge. We tried to take the Panther around this obstacle into the meadows, but the fields close to the river were marshy, and the tracks soon sank in deeply.

  There was no benefit in trying to make the machine go on any further. The river Elbe was within walking distance, the fuel was gone, and the engine was in danger of catching fire.

  We drove the old panzer further into the marshes, knowing this was the end, and not wanting the machine to fall into any other hands, either Russian, American or even German. With the wounded and the civilians lifted off, we drove the Panther in second gear for a few more metres, until it hit a stretch of water surrounded by bulrushes. It began to subside, the engine end going down first. We jumped clear and watched it sink.

  With fumes rising into the air, the front plate rose up, the long gun barrel dripping with marsh water. The cupola, from which I had seen so much and given so many orders in the heat of combat, filled up with the stagnant water, and slid below the surface. There were some final bubbles and fumes. I stood there in silence as the green weeds gathered over the Panther, and, when the surface was still, I turned with my crew and we walked at the head of our small column along the choked roads down to the great River Elbe.

  The approaches to the river were packed with people of all types: civilians, unarmed troops, and some combat troops who still carried their weapons. Among these were Waffen SS men of the Panzer Corps who were pushing through the crowds ahead of us, forcing the ranks of people out of their path. I could just see the river down at the foot of the slopes, over the heads of the thousands of people trying to make their way down there. The water looked black, and the river was about two hundred metres wide. There was a single bridge at this point spanning the width, the other bridges to north and south having been destroyed in April to prevent the Americans crossing. This bridge was a narrow, wood and steel construction, and as we came onto the slope I saw the reason for the so many people still waiting to cross over: the bridge was blown up in its central point, and only a single file of people could walk across to the American side, one at a time.

  The American bank looked largely desert
ed; there were no panzers or gun emplacements there, and no American infantry that I could see. I spoke to a Leutnant of an artillery unit beside me in the crowd, and he told me that the Americans had pulled their men back several kilometres to the West of the river.

  ‘They don’t want a conflict with the Russians,’ he said with a shrug. ‘But look at all these people. There must be fifty or sixty thousand people here. Will the Amis let all of us cross over to them?’

  I squinted down at the opposite bank. The line of people who had already crossed over the damaged bridge were simply fanning out across the grassland on that side, trudging off to the West. There was a huge pile of discarded small arms over there – carbines, rifles and machine guns, helmets and Panzerfausts – indicating that the troops saw no need of them when on the American side. I saw some men trying to swim the river, against the swollen and fast-flowing current. Some emerged on the American bank, but many seemed to disappear under the dark water and not resurface. Someone had tried to make a boat out of a bridging pontoon, but this sank slowly as its crew paddled across, and the men slipped away under the water.

  Ahead of us, the SS men were beating a path through the crowds in their rush to reach the riverbank. Shots were fired, and in a minute we stepped over the bodies of two artillery cadets who had evidently sought to argue with the SS. There were other bodies lying neglected on the ground: wounded men and civilians who had succumbed, and those in their final throes who had nobody to assist them. Lost children wandered through the thousands of adults, crying out for their relatives. The civilians in my column gathered up half a dozen of these children, and we remained together as we shuffled slowly forward to the bridge.

  On the approaches, there were troops guarding the bridge itself, who sought to extort valuables from those people waiting to cross, in return for jumping forward in the crowds. For a gold watch, a good camera or a diamond ring, you could go directly to the bridge itself without waiting. At first the people cursed these troops, but the sound of a bombardment from behind us, up on the slopes above the river, and the screams of the wounded from those explosions, brought many offers of payment. The crowd was swaying, and people were falling underfoot and being trampled. From somewhere, a horse bolted through the crowd, kicking and trampling anyone who got in its path, until it was felled with shots. When a Red aircraft flew low overhead, not firing but low enough for us to smell the vapour of its exhausts, the crowd panicked and tried to storm the entrance to the bridge itself.

  Many people were crushed or trodden to death here, and inevitably it was the frailest and weakest who suffered the most. The banks of the river were steep clay cliffs, and many civilians fell into the water and did not resurface. In all this chaos, the remnants of my column clambered finally onto the bridge, and we began to walk across the planks in single file, with the water twenty metres below us, squeezing past the damaged section in the centre.

  Setting foot on the opposite bank was a strange experience.

  During everything we had seen and done in our breakout from the Kessel, the thought of the American side of the Elbe had been constantly in our minds. Now that we trod on the grass, without one single American soldier, panzer or American plane in sight, the sensation was unreal, as if my feet were numb. With my crew and the fragments of infantry and civilians still with us, we left our pistols and other weapons on the pile of side arms, a pyramid of gunmetal which rose to a height of four metres. All I kept was the photo in my pocket, and the Capo’s Iron Cross on its ribbon, snatched from his body in the sunken road. As we turned to leave, a Kettenhund came staggering towards us.

  This man was drunk, and waving a pistol at us. Our civilians shrunk away from him, while he gestured with the pistol at the medal in my hand.

  ‘I’ll take that,’ he said, with a reek of schnapps.

  ‘You didn’t earn it,’ I said.

  ‘The American boys pay me ten bucks for an Iron Cross,’ he laughed. He used the American word bucks, not dollars, as if he was now one of them. ‘I’ll give you two bucks for yours now, so you can get a meal and a shave.’

  Just as I hit him in the face, he shot me.

  That was the way my war ended, in May 1945, on the West bank of the Elbe, under American occupation but without an American in sight. After my two years of fighting, after Kursk and the retreat to the West, after the Halbe Kessel and the fields full of bodies. After everything I was ashamed of, and everything that I took pride in, my war ended with a drunken Kettenhund shooting a hole in my shoulder blade. As I lay on the West bank of the Elbe, watching the boots of my Panther crew as they kicked the Kettenhund man to death right there and then, I could only close my eyes against the sky and accept that everything that we had done was now at an end.

  *

  My crew took me to a Red Cross centre in the American zone: an improvised hospital in an abandoned school building on the outskirts of Hanover. My injury was extensive, and added to the existing wound in my back, recovery was slow. I spent days in the grounds of the school building, listening to American radio shows and playing cards. At first, the food that we were given was so rich and sweet that it made me vomit, as my stomach was accustomed to Wehrmacht rations and water. We German men would stand at the table at meal times and shake our heads in wonder at the sight of the hot dogs, scrambled eggs and bread rolls, the biscuits and Hershey bars we could buy from the store. The nurses were Red Cross volunteers and nuns of various countries, who could not be bettered anywhere for the care they gave us.

  My uniform was folded in a locker, and I took to wearing old civilian trousers and shirt which came from the hospital clothing bank. I shaved every day, and smoked cigarettes in the sunshine. The patients did not speak to each other about their experiences in the war. Once, I saw a new patient brought in, who had been injured in a knife fight. I thought I recognised him as one of the SS men from the bridge crossing, but I said nothing about this, and neither did he. My Panther crew were dispersed to prisoner processing camps in the American and British sectors, and I heard that the civilians that had been in our column simply disappeared into the landscape of Germany.

  I was interrogated by an American sergeant, who wanted only to know if I was a member of the National Socialists. He was less interested in my war record; there were simply so many of us to be processed. May 1945 turned to June, and then July.

  Now the wisdom of surrendering to the Americans was confirmed absolutely in my mind, because everybody knew that the information we had about our prisoners in the East was zero, literally zero. The millions of men who had surrendered to the Reds East of the Elbe had melted into the Soviet system, and nothing was known of them. Some people said that they were in the Central Soviet Republics, places that lay beyond the Caucasus Mountains, and now might just as well be on the moon. Other people said that they were in Siberia, or Mongolia, from where (the Hiwis and Red prisoners had always told us) not even Russians can ever return. We in the West felt vindicated in our determination to escape that fate, while many of us also felt uneasy, knowing that luck had played a large part in our diet of hot dogs and chocolate.

  At the same time, the future of the Western part of Germany was becoming clearer. The Western Allies were investing in rebuilding the cities they had destroyed. Anything could be bought for a price: coffee, cosmetics, guns, gasoline, morphine, colour magazines, cameras, bourbon. I was offered a Jeep if I could scrape together ten Iron Crosses plus Luger pistols to go with them.

  ‘They gotta be Lugers,’ my American contact insisted. ‘Walthers won’t do it.’

  The streets were full of German girls walking with American GIs, and glum German boys watching them pass. The atmosphere in the streets, strangely, felt like some time before the war, when the future seemed full of possibilities. My future, though, was uncertain. My only remaining family had been the Wehrmacht, and I had no home, no occupation and no resources. At night, the hospital ward was full of weeping and cries, as the men dreamed of their battles.

&n
bsp; Some nights, I did not let myself sleep, knowing I would see the Halbe Kessel again, and above all the dead Russian man in the cellar, whose friend gave his steel helmet to the German child. Why did that one Russian visit me at night, after all the scores that I had killed, the thousands that I had seen killed? Because I showed him the photo of the girl in my pocket – was that why? I lay on the bed, in my own personal Kessel of the mind, wondering about all this.

  I knew the time was approaching for me to leave the hospital. One by one, the wounded German men that were in the hospital were able to leave, and most were discharged into the civilian population. The nurses saw that I was troubled by this, and they didn’t understand why.

  ‘But you have your sister,’ one nurse said to me after changing the dressing over my shoulder wound for the last time, as we watched humid rain on the windows of the ward, late one afternoon. ‘Or is she actually your girlfriend? The photo that you keep.’

  I didn’t answer.

  ‘What is her name, Wolfgang? You have never told us her name.’

  The photo was in a frame on my locker. I made the frame myself from pieces of a medical box, and fitted a glass over it from a piece that I found in the gardens. I looked at that photo each day, remembering the girl’s mother and the way that she died on the rear deck of my Panther in the Kessel.

  To be frank, I had started to imagine a new life with that girl, and the remnants of whatever family she had – to replace the complete absence of family in my life outside the panzer troops. If I must be honest, I had spent my time in the hospital imagining my future life with that girl, and a house that we might have in the American sector, and me finding a paying job, maybe working with machines. Any solitary man knows the kind of thoughts that I had.