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Le Tissier - The siege of Küstrin, 1945: gateway to Berlin

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Le Tissier The siege of Küstrin, 1945: gateway to Berlin
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The unexpected arrival of Soviet troops at the end of January 1945 at the ancient fortress and garrison town of Kstrin came as a tremendous shock to the German High Command-the Soviets were now only 50 miles from Berlin itself. The Red Army needed the vital road and rail bridges passing through Kstrin for their forthcoming assault on the capital, but flooding and their own high commands strategic blunders resulted in a sixty-day siege by two Soviet armies which totally destroyed the town. The delay in the Soviet advance also gave the Germans time to consolidate the defenses shielding Berlin west of the Oder River. Despite Hitlers orders to fight on to the last bullet, the Kstrin garrison commander and 1,000 of the defenders managed a dramatic breakout to the German lines.The protracted siege had an appalling human cost - about 5,000 Germans were killed, 9,000 wounded and 6,000 captured, and the Russians lost 5,000 killed and 15,000 wounded. Tony Le Tissier, in this graphic and painstakingly researched account, has recorded events in extraordinary detail, using the vivid eyewitness testimony of survivors to bring the story of the siege to life.

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First published in Great Britain in 2009 by Pen Sword Military an imprint of - photo 1

First published in Great Britain in 2009 by Pen Sword Military an imprint of - photo 2

First published in Great Britain in 2009 by Pen & Sword Military an imprint of Pen & Sword Books Ltd 47 Church Street Barnsley South Yorkshire S70 2AS
Copyright Tony Le Tissier, 2009
ISBN 978 1 84884 022 5
eISBN 9781848846975
The right of Tony Le Tissier to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing.
Typeset in Sabon by Phoenix Typesetting, Auldgirth, Dumfriesshire
Printed in the UK by CPI UK
Pen & Sword Books Ltd incorporates the Imprints of Pen & Sword Aviation, Pen & Sword Maritime, Pen & Sword Military, Wharncliffe Local History, Pen & Sword Select, Pen & Sword Military Classics and Leo Cooper.
For a complete list of Pen & Sword titles please contact PEN & SWORD BOOKS LIMITED 47 Church Street, Barnsley, South Yorkshire, S70 2AS, England E-mail: enquiries@pen-and-sword.co.uk Website: www.pen-and-sword.co.uk
Contents

Introduction

This work is largely based on the works of Herr Fritz Kohlase and Herr Hermann Thrams with their most kind permission. In the 1990s Herr Kohlase published his experiences in the latter part of the siege and his work attracted a lot of feedback from other Kstrin survivors, whose accounts are included here. The late Herr Thrams was a Kstrin teenager at the time of the siege and later wrote a diary-based history of the siege that provided much of the background information.

I am also grateful to the management and staff of the Seelow Museum, who proved extremely helpful in my research.

A.H. Le Tissier

Lymington, Hants

May 2008

List of Maps

Chapter One

The Development of a Fortress

Kstrin 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 Cstrin 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 familys 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 (Knig, Knigin, 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 Kstrin. 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 Ltzen 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 fathers 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 - photo 3

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 merkwrdigsten Begebenheiten des gegenwrtigen Krieges in Deutschland (Leipzig, 1758).

Key:

A. The town and fortress of Kstrin

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

Kstrin 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 Auerstdt. The fortress at Kstrin 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 towns 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 KstrinLandsbergKreuz line in 18567, 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 18746, when new lines linked Kstrin with Stettin on the Baltic and Breslau in Upper Silesia. In 1885 the KstrinStargard railway line was opened, and in 1896 the KstrinSonnenburg line, the same year that the line to Berlin was doubled. A further connection was made in 1884 with a line to Neudamm. Kstrin 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, Kstrin-Altstadt on the Island, Kstrin-Kietz and Kietzerbusch, which was little more than a halt.

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