The Last Panther - Slaughter of the Reich - The Halbe Kessel 1945 by Wolfgang Faust

Author:Wolfgang Faust
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Publisher: Bayern Classic Publications
Published: 2015-05-20T07:00:00+00:00

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In the past, I had slept easily enough in a panzer: the thin, metal chair made a good perch, and you rested your head on the turret wall or on the gun breech, with your forehead on your linked fingers for a pillow. If you were in the panzer all night, a shell case was your toilet, and fresh air came from opening the hatch to empty it. In this way, three men could pass the night in the turret cage, and the other two crew men on their seats in the hull.

On that night in the woodland West of Halbe, though, I did not want to sleep. I took another mouthful of amphetamines, painkillers and schnapps. The forest around my Panther was not sleeping either: it was filled with voices, cries, the wailing of children and the sound of equipment being readied for our next stage of the breakout. Searching for aspirin, I fumbled in my tunic pocket, and found the photo of the young woman that the lady on the Panther’s deck had given me before she died. A grey light was coming through the cupola, and I climbed out to examine the photo more fully. The girl was a beauty, and like all lonely soldiers, I imagined that she might be good, understanding company for a man such as me. There was an address on the back, a town to the west of the Elbe, in the American occupied sector of Germany. There was no name for the girl. I smiled, and put the photo safely in my pocket again.

A few birds were singing, but that stopped as the sound of bombardment grew from the countryside to our West. Close at hand, in the forest, there was more noise – shouting and cursing, and people clamouring for attention.

I went into the trees to see what this was. I found a scrum of our soldiers hunched over something on the ground, in the dawn light. I pushed through them, and with the authority that came from a panzer uniform at this point in the fighting, the infantry made way for me slowly. I found that a group of German troops had found a Seydlitz man.

The Seydlitz agent was pressed back against the roots of a tree, clenching his fists, gritting his teeth. His field-grey uniform had a German eagle but no swastika, and one of our men handed me an armband that had been in the Seydlitz man’s pocket.

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