Battle of Halbe, 1945: the breakout of the German Ninth Army

Halbe was a small village in the woods south of Berlin. In the last days of April 1945 it became the eye of the needle through which the German Ninth Army had to pass if its men were to escape Soviet captivity. The breakout turned the village and the forest around it into one of the great killing grounds of the end of the war.²

Background: the Ninth Army on the Oder

In April 1945 the Ninth Army under General Theodor Busse held the Oder front directly east of Berlin. Earl Ziemke, in the US Army's official history of the war in the East, counts fourteen German divisions there facing the whole of Marshal Georgy Zhukov's 1st Belorussian Front; History UK credits the army with about 100,000 men and 800 tanks.³

The Soviet offensive opened on 16 April. Zhukov broke through at the Seelow Heights on 19 April, and the Germans fell back. Instead of retreating past Berlin, much of the Ninth Army drifted southwest into the forests around Halbe and Märkisch Buchholz, between Zhukov's front and Marshal Ivan Konev's 1st Ukrainian Front, which was racing north toward the capital from the south.⁴ › Battle of the Seelow Heights, 1945

Hitler's insistence that the army hold the Oder line had left it little room to move. When the encirclement was already closing, Busse summed up his position to his army group commander, Gotthard Heinrici, in a sentence that Ziemke quotes: "I was kept forward too long." Heinrici answered: "That was a crime."⁵

Armies and commanders

Inside the pocket, by Liberation Route Europe's estimate, were 150,000 to 200,000 soldiers, with the army headquarters and thousands of refugees, local civilians and soldiers' families; the Brandenburg tourism board speaks of more than 150,000 soldiers, including SS men, Volkssturm, Hitler Youth and Labor Service boys.⁶

Outside it, to the west, stood General Walther Wenck's Twelfth Army. Hitler ordered it to turn east and relieve Berlin; Busse's aim was simply to reach it and cross with it to the west bank of the river.⁷

Against them stood two Soviet fronts: Zhukov's 1st Belorussian Front and Konev's 1st Ukrainian Front, whose armies met behind the Ninth Army to seal the trap.⁸

The battle, phase one: the trap closes

When the ring closed depends on the source. Liberation Route Europe and History UK say the army was completely surrounded by 22 April. Ziemke dates the junction of the two Soviet fronts at Bohnsdorf, on the southeastern edge of Berlin, to 24 April, and the Volksbund, the German war graves commission, writes of the encirclement on 27 April.⁹

Fear drove what followed. Rather than surrender to the Red Army, the trapped soldiers wanted to reach the Americans on the Elbe and give themselves up there.¹⁰

Phase two: the breakout attempts

Busse ordered a breakout. The first attempt was made at Halbe on 24 April, and several more followed. They failed: Ziemke records that by 28 April the leading tanks of one breakout had vanished and Busse reported that his army could neither make another concerted attempt nor hold out much longer.¹¹

A veteran's memoir published by the Volksbund describes a breakout planned for 27 April from the western edge of the pocket at Märkisch Buchholz, with some 60 kilometers of forest to cover to reach Wenck, and its collapse into chaos: units dissolving, loose horses bolting, shells falling.¹²

Turning point: Wenck's attack and the last breakout

On 29 April Wenck's Twelfth Army attacked east toward Potsdam. Berlin was out of reach, but the attack held open a door for the trapped army.¹³

Bitter fighting raged in and around Halbe as the Ninth Army pushed west through it. Soviet artillery, backed by heavy air attacks, was devastating. The veteran remembered that in the center of Halbe the streets were completely covered with bodies of soldiers and civilians, and that the living had to pass over them to get west. According to the Volksbund, large parts of the German units broke out westward on 29 and 30 April, helped by the Twelfth Army's attack, and reached its lines near Beelitz.¹⁴

The veteran's own escape shows how it ended for many. He reached the waiting troops on 1 May and heard there of Hitler's death; on 4 May, with the ferry no longer running, he crossed the Elbe at Rogätz in a fishing boat with some twenty others, threw his revolver into the river, and walked into American captivity.¹⁵

Aftermath

How many got through is counted differently: about 25,000 soldiers according to Liberation Route Europe and History UK, while Ziemke writes that the Twelfth Army took 30,000 Ninth Army survivors through its line. On 3 May Wenck sent an envoy across the Elbe to negotiate with the US Ninth Army, and between 5 and 7 May most of his force, with the survivors from Halbe, crossed the river into American captivity.¹⁶

About 40,000 people died in the pocket, by the count of Liberation Route Europe and the Volksbund, many of them civilians fleeing from the East whose wagons had been caught in the trap. Brandenburg's civic education center gives a higher estimate: up to 60,000 Wehrmacht soldiers, tens of thousands of Red Army soldiers and many civilians.¹⁷

In the warm weather the dead were buried where they lay, in gardens, shell holes and mass graves along the forest roads, on the orders of the Soviet occupation authorities, who feared epidemics.¹⁸

Legacy and memory

In 1951 the Protestant pastor Ernst Teichmann began moving the scattered dead into a central cemetery on seven hectares of forest near the village; the Volksbund adds that he completed the register of known graves against the resistance of local officials. The Waldfriedhof Halbe, with eleven grave fields designed by Walter Funcke and Karl Foerster, holds about 24,000 victims: German soldiers and civilians, Soviet forced laborers, people executed at the Berlin-Tegel execution site and prisoners who died in the postwar Soviet internment camp at Ketschendorf.¹⁹

It is the largest war cemetery in Brandenburg. From the mid-1990s right-wing extremists tried to use it for marches in honor of the "heroes", and local and statewide alliances organized against them. In November 2006 about 8,000 people came to Halbe for a "Day of Democrats" under banners such as "Stop the abuse of history".²⁰

An open-air exhibition now explains the history of the site, in the village and at the cemetery entrance; Brandenburg's civic education center dates it to April 2015 and counts sixteen steles.²¹

Visiting today

The cemetery lies on Ernst-Teichmann-Straße in Halbe, southeast of Berlin, and is open to all visitors. The remains of the dead are still being found in the forests around the village, and they are still being buried there.²² › The Battle of Berlin, 1945