Frankfurt der Oder

 

Hello all! Back in January I returned from a European vacation and thought I would fill you in on some of the sights I saw. I am not going to bore you with tales of Berlin’s nightlife, the fascinating mix of rebuilt old and Soviet blech in Warsaw, or even comparisons between sauna cultures in Berlin and Helsinki. That is old hat (and hair) and the sophisticated Glib community is not interested in the same-old same-old travel commentary. If you were, you would read Rick Steves and line up to see the same old cathedrals with Paul and Paula from Des Moines.

In part one, we will travel to beautiful Seelow with a side trip to the other Frankfurt—the Frankfurt der Oder. Since the people I was visiting had school, work, and sleeping one off on their schedules, I couldn’t interest them in a visit to “rural” Germany. No problem. I just used Germany’s public transit system. I walked to a Deutche Bahn (DB) station and purchased a day regional ticket for €18. This enabled me to travel from Berlin to the Polish border to Seelow and return by my choice of RB (Regional Bahn) and VB (Local Bahn).

German rail (DB) has everything from the high-speed ICE with all the amenities, intercity not-high-speed, DB trains with amenities, RB (like US commuter lines), and VB, which are 2- to 3-car standard gauge smaller than standard rail cars but bigger than streetcars going from small cities to smaller towns. In and around cities, you have S-Bahn (city-based commuter lines), U-Bahn (subways), and Strassen Bahn (street cars) plus bus routes. Berlin has plenty of everything but the VB. German trains, like most things German, are clean, efficient, and numerous.

As I sped east from the Berlin Hauptbahnhof (main train station) on an RB, I was struck by the lingering differences between western and eastern Berlin. As I travelled east, I would see the same ~20 story rectangular apartment/commercial building in eastern Berlin and other small cities we passed. The only difference was in the decorative trim along one side. The choices were an ugly pink, ugly green, or ugly blue—but the blueprints were identical. Soon we passed through the suburbs and entered what passes for rural land in Germany. It was open and rolling with occasional wooded areas. My prior profession kicked in and it was clear there was no defensible terrain. Sure, there were plenty of places where you could break things or kill people, but there was no place to make a line to stop a determined attack. Since it was still early, there were small groups of German shepherd-sized deer in some fields, and farm vehicles about the roads as the farmers prepped fields for spring planting. From a Euro perspective, it was very rural; from an American perspective it was exurb at best.

After an hour, we arrived in Frankfurt Der Oder. I didn’t have time to explore since I needed to transfer to my VB to Seelow. The VB felt like an oversized streetcar as we travelled 27 km to Seelow. While on the way, I noticed another stop for Werbig, a dorf (village) about 4 km farther away, so I stayed on board until I arrived there. I got off the train in the floodplains of the Oder River and could see the town of Seelow in the middle distance on the top of a long bluff. As I strolled through the lowlands, I could see that it was cut by many small canals/drainages and had a distinctly wet-soil smell and feel. Some areas were pasturage and others were clearly farmed. I took a small road with almost no traffic along the base of and then up a steep bluff around 100 feet tall with bits of forest near the edge. After about 5 km of walking, I entered the south side of Seelow.

 

Along my walk, the events of April 1945 are still clearly in evidence. Less than 1 km later, I passed a cemetery with 13 anti-war monuments scattered about. The DDR started the practice and several are more recent. None were artistic enough to waste electrons on.

 

Seelow is a pleasant small town founded in the 16th century (2020 pop ~5200) and is the kreis (county seat) for this rural area. I grabbed a pretzel roll with a wurst and a dunkel weissen (yes, a German bier for breakfast—when in Rome, etc.). I enjoyed my snack and watched small-town German life around me. In front of me, the main road through town was arrow straight from the west and headed straight east toward the Oder River about 20 km distant. It was a very nice day for a northern German winter with enough sun through the clouds that I would throw an occasional light shadow. Now some of you may wonder what brought me to this insignificant town; others already know. For the road through town was the old Reichstrasse 1 which ran from Berlin to Konigsburg, Germany (today Kaliningrad, Russia), and this was the point of attack for the Soviet offensive on Berlin. In April 1945, Seelow had all the attention from Stalin, Zhukov, Hitler, and the Wehrmacht that the farmers could handle.

I continued my stroll along RS 1 to the very edge of the bluff and there I found the primary object of my day: a small bunker-looking structure, a “petting zoo” of parked USSR military equipment, a large statue on a towering plinth, and a section of woods. From the bluff, the old RS 1 continued in a plumb line straight to a small city about 20 km away. That was the then “Festung Kustrin” and the Oder River. Looking over the peaceful landscape I tried to envision it in April 1945. Throughout the lowlands, I could see where tens of thousands of soldiers, thousands of vehicles, and countless miles of trenches, fighting positions, obstacles, and wire had been. And what I could see in my mind’s eye from this point of high ground extended at least 100 km to the south and another 100 km to the north encompassing well over a million men poised for battle—a battle to be centered where I stood. Why? Because Stalin decreed it, and Zhukov was bound and determined to be the first to Berlin. I turned my back to the view and went to the petting zoo and museum.

The petting zoo wasn’t that impressive, with a T-34, a Katyusha, two towed pieces of artillery, a towed heavy mortar, and a searchlight. By this period in the war, the Germans knew how to deal with and destroy all of this equipment, but the Katyushas were reviled and nicknamed “Stalin’s Organs” by the Wehrmacht soldiers. The photo shows why. It was an area-indirect fire weapon that rapidly launched a salvo of 36-48 (model dependent) 83-mm unguided rockets up to 8.5 km and had a short reload period. Since the USSR considered (and Russia considers) artillery to be the god of the battlefield, they amassed many (thousands) of these systems and fired them at a rapid rate. In Iraq, we would consider the enemy to be quite froggie if they fired 6-8 rockets at a time and they rarely volley fired since we would kill them with counterfires. The Soviets would routinely fire hundreds to thousands of rockets in a single fire mission. Since being under indirect fire can quickly produce a helpless feeling, I think I would have rapidly grown to hate the Katyusha as well.

 

The Katyusha. The USSR employed tens of thousands of these for close-in fire support. The rockets were not accurate, but if you saturate a 1-km-sized box with thousands of rockets in less than a minute, you can get your point across. The most popular truck chassis used were made in the US by Studebaker.

The museum itself is only one display room about the size of a basketball court with a smaller attached theater. The USSR let the DDR develop the museum in the 1970s. The original DDR displays largely praised the USSR and explained how it was those western Germans who led the gullible, yet peace-loving, eastern Germans into a hopeless war against the proud socialists of the world. Since unification, the displays have become much more neutral, but there is a book with photos of the old displays available. Most of the exhibits are WWII armaments and are interesting with recovered Panzerfausts, small arms, grenades, uniforms, and load-bearing equipment used by both sides. An interesting aside was that the Soviets pulled out their broken heavy equipment shortly after the battle. They left the broken German equipment largely where it was and only allowed the DDR government to move it away in the late 1970s. So, good socialist German farmers had to plow around broken tanks, artillery, and trucks for 30+ years as a good Marxist FU. If you geek out on WWII era weapons, you will enjoy the museum; if you don’t, you will probably wish you spent your €4 on bier.

Next week: Inside the Museum