End of the war in southern Mecklenburg (1945)

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US Army pontoon bridge near Bleckede (1945)

The end of the war in southern Mecklenburg began in 1945 in the west with the Elbe crossing of the United States Army , in the east with the advance of the Red Army on the area of ​​today's Ludwigslust-Parchim district . In between lay in a very small space - between the Plauer See and Parchim  - units of the army and Waffen-SS . A US troop reached Lübz and, along with two Wehrmacht soldiers, got to Soviet units in Reppentin . Reader's Digest considered the company to be one of the most outstanding events of the war (Original: "one of the most fantastic episodes of the whole war").

location

The Yalta Conference had drawn a line of demarcation in western Mecklenburg , which was supposed to keep the United States Army and the Red Army apart. It ran from Dömitz along the east bank of the Elde , past Techentin , over Reichsstraße 191 , Grabow (Elde) and Groß Laasch , the Lewitz Canal , through the Schweriner See and the Wallenstein Graben to the eastern border of Wismar . On crossing roads have barriers erected on both sides in several hundred meters apart. The proximity of a roadside building was important for accommodating the guard commander .

US troops on the west side

Advance of the Western Allies into Mecklenburg

On the night of April 30 to May 1, 1945, units of the 9th US Army, led by General Simpson , crossed the Elbe . About pontoon bridges in Bleckede who reached 7th Armored Division , the 8th Infantry Division and the 82nd Airborne Division of Mecklenburg . On the advance in the direction of Ludwigslust , their tips had to make their way through oncoming incapacitated armed forces. The headquarters of the three American divisions set up their headquarters in Ludwigslust Palace . " Ludwigslust was already a boiling mass of captured Germans in uniform on May 1st ." Since the Americans reached Ludwigslust before the Soviets on May 2nd, they could claim the entire road from Ludwigslust to Dömitz (R 191) for themselves. The Americans and Soviets moved the line of demarcation only slightly between May 4th and 8th. The interpreter was Leonard Linton , who spoke English, Russian, French and German.

Red Army on the east side

Withdrawal of Army Group Vistula; the demarcation line on the left

After the capital of the Reich was included in the Battle of Berlin , the units of the 1st Belarusian Front and the 2nd Belarusian Front advanced further west every day. With her, the Wehrmacht High Command (OKW) migrated from Zossen to the northwest. At the end of April 1945 there were no Soviet units east of the demarcation line, but units of the Wehrmacht and the SS (of the same size). After the capture of Schwedt / Oder by the Red Army on April 26, 1945, almost all combat and retreat routes were used by the Germans Troops with their staffs and commanders from Schwedt via Mirow , Plau and Lübz to Parchim; they often moved on to Ludwigslust, Grabow and Schwerin. Schwedt's last 300 to 400 defenders fled to Parchim on bicycles on April 24. The Schwedt Volkssturm held together as far as Parchim and dissolved there.

Streams of people

Gradual withdrawal of the OKW to the north and ultimately to Mürwik (1945)

Kurt von Tippelskirch , Deputy Commander in Chief of Army Group Vistula , had almost no contact with his armies from April 29, 1945. On May 1, news of Hitler's suicide added to the confusion. After v. Tippelskirch had surrendered to the Americans in Ludwigslust on May 2, he was looking for a way from Schwerin to the headquarters of parts of the 21st Army in Alt Damerow against the current of refugees and soldiers . On the same day, the Americans reached the demarcation line. Every checkpoint was guarded by an infantry company. The German soldiers were disarmed and taken to a hastily set up prison camp in an open field west of Ludwigslust. Little did the Americans know that 360,000 German soldiers wanted to reach Reichsstrasse 106 and surrender to them. On some streets, German soldiers, treks , concentration camp inmates and prisoners of war marched in three pillars - in the hope that low-flying aircraft would not shoot at such crowds. Chaotic conditions prevailed on the R 191 between Plau am See and Ludwigslust. She was the main way for the withdrawal of the 21st Army . From April 23 to May 3, 1945, 100,000, a total of 1 million people, moved through the area of ​​what is now the Parchim district . On the Reichsstraße 321 and on the country roads near Matzlow , Parchim , Spornitz and Brenz (Mecklenburg) , horse-drawn carts and motor vehicles could not be avoided when the car was stationary; because the trenches were full of discarded weapons and ammunition, abandoned military equipment and shot horses. The Eldebrücke in Neuburg was blown up by the SS on May 3rd - the day of the victory celebration in Lübz .

Contacting the Soviet armed forces

The commander of the 87th Reconnaissance Battalion of the 7th Armored Division instructed First Lieutenant William A. Knowlton as leader of a reconnaissance company to search for the Soviet units:

“Knowlton, Ludwigslust is the point to which we can go. Our units are set up in a north-south direction outside the city. Take your unit and find the Russians, they're somewhere east - rumor has it 50 to 100 miles east of here. Get a few of them and bring them over here. We need to discuss certain frontal problems. But between us and the Russians lies the entire German 12th Army. If you run into trouble, we can't help you. Don't let that drive you crazy and keep me updated. Good luck!"

- Knowlton's commander

For the "25% German" first lieutenant this was a suicide mission ; because on the way to the east was not "the whole 12th Army ", but the Army Group Vistula with the 3rd Panzer Army and the 21st Army and their commanders. In addition, there were a relatively large number of Waffen SS associations that committed crimes in the final stages on May 3rd .

From Ludwigslust to Lübz

Knowlton only had outdated maps. In view of the risk of losing battles and fuel consumption, he renounced guns . He had three platoons with 90 men, eleven M8 greyhounds and 16 jeeps , which set out on May 2nd and 3rd. He chose to use main roads because that way he could give the impression that an entire army was following him. This consideration proved to be correct even before Neustadt-Glewe ; the oncoming German soldiers threw away their weapons. Others were impressed by Knowlton's level-headedness and coolness. If the troop had needed two hours to cross Neustadt-Glewe, they were waved through in Parchim by German traffic regulators, soldiers and SS members - on the assumption that the "heads of powerful US units" wanted to fight the Red Army. Knowlton's command disarmed a Wehrmacht unit in Rome (Mecklenburg) .

Taking Lübz

Narrow, winding and full of tanks and guns , Lübz was the eye of the needle. The streets from Plau, Ganzlin and Goldberg converged on the Postkurve (which still exists today) not far from the lift bridge. The German soldiers were ready to fight. No radio connection could be established to the US headquarters in Ludwigslust. Knowlton came across several commanders of the Wehrmacht and SS troops defeated in Schwedt. General Walter Hörnlein didn't quite believe him, but drove on. The demolition manager Gerhard Gerigk threw the fuses for the bridge blast into the Elde . A general and the town commander of Luebz agreed not to carry out the demolition of the Eldebrücken, which was ordered for May 3rd at 10:00 p.m. - regardless of whether the Americans or the Soviets reached Luebz first. A major capitulated and the mayor surrendered the city. Knowlton ordered the weapons to be handed in in the courtyard of the Lübzer brewery and elsewhere. A very good English-speaking captain of a tank marine brigade saw through Knowlton's bluff , but let him sleep unmolested in the old office tower. The NSDAP had its local office there since 1933. The SS set up the tower in April 1945 as a command and traffic control center.

The OKW had discovered that Knowlton's troop stood alone east of Ludwigslust. They had already disarmed 275,000 German soldiers; On the German side, however, orders were issued to take up the weapons again and to shoot Knowlton's troops if they resisted. Knowlton agreed with an SS officer that all troops going west should surrender their weapons and all units going east should keep their weapons. Two of the three American trains stayed in Lübz with lieutenants Harry J. Clark and Earl Harrelt and monitored the handover of weapons.

US soldiers and Red Army soldiers meet

Quarters of the Soviet commander in Ganzlin

On May 3, 1945, at 8:00 a.m., Knowlton learned from the commander of the Marine Panzerjagd Brigade, Captain Kendler , that Soviet troops were about to encircle Plau from the north and south. With the 3rd train he drove further east on the R 191. Companions were a German officer and Gerhard Gerigk . Both knew the location of the minefields in front of Lübz . Before Plau am See , SS units blew up the road bridge. Knowlton turned back and wanted to take the detour via Reppentin . At 9.25 a.m. he met a Soviet reconnaissance aircraft there. They arranged a meeting with the Soviet regimental commander. Led by a major, Knowlton's squad met the commanding colonel at 10:30 a.m. at the command post of the 546th Rifle Regiment of the 191st Rifle Division. The command post was at the exit of Schlemmin in the direction of Kritzow on the farm to the left in front of the “canal” to Kritzower See. Knowlton and his men returned to Lübz with a Soviet major and Sergeant Gerigk. Five days before the unconditional surrender of the Wehrmacht , US soldiers and Red Army soldiers celebrated victory in Lübz. The very next day, Knowlton was awarded the Silver Star by James M. Gavin and promoted to Captain .

Liberation, victory and defeat in Lübz

Russian signposts to Plau and Parchim at the Lübzer Post (2015)

On the death march of the Ravensbrück concentration camp , Esther Bejarano came to Malchow at the end of April 1945 . In the subcamp there , she came across six girls (including a friend) from the Auschwitz concentration camp . One of the last columns moved from Karow no further west towards Goldberg , but south. On the way to Plau, the column was first shot at by Germans, then overtaken. Before Plau, the tanks lay burning in the ditch of today's federal highway 103 . When it was no longer allowed to shoot, the seven girls ran away. Behind Broock (Lübz) they found shelter on a farm in Riederfelde . “The Russians are on the right of the farm, the Americans on the left,” the farmer told them. The Americans brought the girls to Lübz in tanks and had them served in Sturm's restaurant . As in Auschwitz, Esther played the accordion, but to Russian and American songs. When the Red Army marched into Lübz to great cheers, a large picture of Adolf Hitler was burned at the victory celebration on the market square . The Luebers stayed in their homes. For Esther and her friends “this event was in the deepest sense the day of liberation and rebirth”.

Before Lutheran , Americans met the concentration camp column moving on. Sixty years after the end of the war, Henryk Perkowski wrote to Gudrun Stein, Mayor of Lübz, about what he had experienced between April 27 and May 3, 1945.

“Actually the situation at this point in time (May 2, 1945, between 6:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m.) was paradoxical. Half of the Chaussee was overcrowded with German military, horse-drawn vehicles and pedestrians. On the opposite side, American vans moved as if on a parade. Soldiers peered out of the hatches. There was no shooting, no disarming. The vans struggled to get through. They drove on in the direction of Lübz, and we only stayed with the Germans again. "

- Henryk Perkowski

After years of imprisonment in concentration camps, Perkowski and the other prisoners spent the first night in freedom on farms in Lutheran.

On the same day, the British Army and Canadian forces occupied Wismar and the US Army Schwerin. Parchim and Grabow were handed over to the Red Army on May 3, 1945 without a fight. One day later, on May 4, Hans-Georg von Friedeburg signed the partial surrender for the British headquarters near Lüneburg , 100 kilometers west of Lübz, on behalf of the last Reich President Karl Dönitz , who had left the last Reich government in Flensburg - Mürwik Troops in Northern Germany , Denmark , Holland and Norway .

meaning

General William A. Knowlton

“Courage and prudence from Oltn. William A. Knowlton and his approx. 90 fellow combatants, as well as a "Grande Armée" defeated for the second time in the history of Europe and Russia, achieved two things: Large Wehrmacht and SS units chose the lesser evil and were taken prisoner in the West. In the geographical triangle between Ludwigslust, Schwerin and Plau, the German civilian population was spared a large number of otherwise unavoidable armed forces. The German side provided admonishing evidence of the correctness of this assessment with the unsubstantiated battle on May 3, 1945 in Blievenstorf . On the last day of the war in our region, nineteen German and eight Soviet soldiers were killed and three civilians were killed in this village between 12 noon and 3 p.m. 38 residential and farm buildings were destroyed. Twice courageous Blievenstorf residents were prevented from hoisting the white flag on their church tower under threat of shooting by high-ranking SS officers. "

- Eberhart Schultze

literature

  • 82nd Airborne Division : After Action Report.
  • William A. Knowlton : Your mission is to contact the Russians. Reader's Digest No. 8, August 1945 (letter from Knowlton to his wife).
  • Jürgen Thorwald : The end on the Elbe. The last months of World War II in the east. Droemer Knaur, Stuttgart 1995, ISBN 3-426-80068-3 .
  • Christian Madaus: Rise and Fall of National Socialism in Mecklenburg from 1924 to 1945. 2nd, revised and expanded edition, Stock & Stein, Schwerin 2003, ISBN 3-910179-19-3 .
  • Kurt Redmer: It happened in 1945 and 1946 near and in Schwerin: Blievenstorf – Crivitz – Dümmer – Friedrichsruhe – Goldenstädt – Parchim – Zapel expansion. Plawe Verlag, Plau am See 2003, ISBN 3-935244-11-8 .
  • Wilhelm Tieke : The end between the Vistula and the Elbe 1944/45. Stuttgart 2003.
  • Eberhart Schultze: The liberation of Lübz and Parchim by allied troops. In: The Parchimer airfields from 1937–2006. Their past and present, with a territorial-historical consideration of the military processes in the last days of the Second World War and the first months of peace in the area between Ganzlin, Lübz, Parchim, Ludwigslust and Grabow. 2nd volume, third part. cw Verlagsgruppe, Schwerin 2006, ISBN 3-933781-53-1 , pp. 140–220.

Remarks

  1. ^ Reader's Digest deleted all references to Gerhard Gerigk in Knowlton's report .
  2. ^ Henryk Perkowski, US Holocaust Museum (English).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Reader's Digest No. 8, August 1945.
  2. ↑ a b c E. Schultze: The advance of the 9th US Army to the demarcation line east of Ludwigslust , in ders. (2007), pp. 140–143.
  3. ↑ a b W. Knowlton (Readers Digest, 1945).
  4. ↑ E. Schultze: The military situation before the lines of the Western Allies on May 2, 1945 , in ders. (2007), pp. 143-146.
  5. ↑ a b c E. Schultze: The long march from Schwedt to Parchim , in ders. (2007), pp. 147-148.
  6. ↑ a b E. Schultze: The particular danger of the Waffen-SS for the company , in ders. (2007), pp. 151–153.
  7. ↑ Jürgen Thorwald: The end on the Elbe. Stuttgart 1995.
  8. ^ Knowlton's commission (article in the English language Wikipedia).
  9. ^ E. Schultze: Order, preparation and vehicle-related scope of the company , in ders. (2007), pp. 148–151.
  10. ^ E. Schultze: The happening between Ludwigslust and Neustadt to Parchim , in ders. (2007), pp. 153–155.
  11. ↑ E. Schultze: With German traffic regulators through Parchim , in ders. (2007), pp. 155–156.
  12. ↑ E. Schultze: The “prisoners” in Lübz , in ders. (2007), pp. 156–159.
  13. ↑ Bernd Bölscher : On the banks of the Oder - Genesis of the end of the war. The 1st Marine Infantry Division and the last contingent of Grand Admiral Dönitz at the end of the Second World War. (2014) .
  14. ↑ E. Schultze: The paradoxical events between Malchow and Lutheran , in ders. (2007), pp. 175-179.
  15. ↑ E. Schultze: Liberation and rebirth in Lübz , in ders. (2007), pp. 173–175.
  16. ↑ Esther Bejarano: They called me crumbs. 2nd edition, Hamburg 1991.
  17. ↑ E. Schultze: The encirclement of Parchims (and the following chapters), in ders. (2007), pp. 191–220.
  18. ↑ American and Soviet soldiers in Grabow (May 3, 1945) .
  19. ↑ E. Schultze: The emergence of American troops paralyzed the German resistance , in ders. (2007), pp. 186-187.