Walking the Ground – Halbe

You’ll never guess what you might find when walking the ground in Halbe!

With the launch of my ‘Encircled’ podcast (telling the story of the German 9th Army’s encirclement in the Halbe Pocket) I figured it was time to go back to the Halbe area and revisit some of the key locations which I talk about in the podcast.

So at the weekend, I started by investigating the ‘Oberförsterei Hammer’ (the ‘senior forest warden’s office’ at Hammer), to see where General Busse and the senior staff of the 9th Army were headquartered in the final days leading up to the breakout from the pocket. 

Between the 24th-28th April 1945, the fields and forests surrounding the Oberförsterei were packed with thousands of German troops and refugees waiting to break out, and whilst they waited, they sheltered under the trees to escape the constant Russian artillery bombardment and strafing attacks from fighter planes.

The area became a bloodbath, and it was littered with the dead and wounded, abandoned vehicles and spent ammunition.

80 years on, the forests are still marked with deep craters, and the area has become a favourite hunting ground for Second World War relic hunters.

That said, when walking through the woods I was still surprised to suddenly come across a number of people armed with metal detectors and shovels! – I literally walked off one path and immediately bumped into a man standing in a two-foot deep hole, digging away.

He was happy to let me take a photo of his morning’s find – a cache of Wehrmacht-issue gas masks! 

Of course, the man said that he’ll occasionally find human remains when he goes digging in the forests. If he does, he reports what he’s found to the German War Graves Commission so that they can come in, exhume the remains, and ensure they receive a proper burial. 

Rightly so.

That said, the fact that the area is still bristling with discarded equipment, weapons, and yes, unfortunately many bodies, just goes to show the scale of the fighting which took place in the Halbe Pocket 80 years ago…