Hello Denis
; this was taken from Carell's book Hitler Moves East...............
Towards 0500 hours on 1st December the XX Corps under General Materna mounted its attack against the motor highway east of Naro-Fominsk with 3rd Motorized Infantry Division, 102nd, 258th, and the reinforced 292nd Infantry Divisions—the main effort being with 258th Infantry Division, which already held the bridge over the Nara at Tashirovo.
The 3rd Motorized Infantry Division and 258th Infantry Division launched an outflanking attack against Naro-Fominsk. The temperature was 34 degrees below zero Centigrade. The battalions shrank more and more—through frost injuries rather than enemy action. Some battalions were down to eighty men.
In the Brandenburg 3rd Motorized Infantry Division the 1st Battalion, 29th Infantry Regiment, lost all its company commanders during the first few days of fighting. The 5th Company, which started this final offensive with seventy men, had only twenty-eight men left by the first evening. The company commander was wounded, the two sergeants had been killed, and of the other nine NCOs four had been killed and three wounded. Nevertheless the 29th Infantry Regiment took Naro-Fominsk and drove another three miles to the east along the highway. But then the attack ground to a standstill at 38 degrees below zero Centigrade.
The only progress made towards the east was on the division's left, in the area of 258th Infantry Division. There a mobile combat group under the command of Anti-aircraft Battalion 611, operating on the division's left wing, punched its way through to the north-east, via Barkhatovo and Kutmevo, to Podazinskiy. Indeed, the "advanced detachment Bracht," with Motorized Reconnaissance Battalion 53, 1st Company of Panzerjäger Battalion 258, two platoons of 1st Company Anti-aircraft Battalion 611, and a few self-propelled guns, succeeded in getting as far as Yushkovo, to the left of the highway. From there it was only 27 miles to the Kremlin.
On the other side of the road was the village of Burzevo. This miserable place with its thirty thatched houses on the far side of a snow-covered drill square was the target of the spearheads of 258th Infantry Division. In the late afternoon of 2nd December the 3rd Battalion, 478th Infantry Regiment, likewise penetrated into the village of Burzevo along the Naro-Fominsk to Moscow road. Units of 2nd Battalion had been holding their ground desperately for several hours against enemy attacks.
Major Staedtke reduced sentries and pickets to the bare minimum and allowed the rest of his men to go into the houses with their warm stoves. There they sat, crouched, or lay, crowded together like sardines with the Russian civilian population. They piled bricks into the stoves. And every hour, as a few men went out to relieve the sentries, they would take a brick with them—but not to warm their feet or hands. The heat had to be saved for something more important. The hot bricks were wrapped in rags and placed on the locks of the machine-guns to prevent the oil from freezing.
The OC 258th Infantry Division withdrew the reinforced 478th Infantry Regiment to Yushkovo; the 3rd Battalion covered the movement as the rearguard. At 2200 hours the Russians made another attack with T-34s. They knew what they wanted. Systematically they fired at the straw roofs to set the houses on fire. Then they broke into the village. Fighting continued in the light of the burning farmhouses. The 8-8-cm. gun finished off two Soviet tanks, but then received a direct hit itself. Self-propelled guns and T-34s chased each other among the blazing houses. The infantry lay in the gardens, behind baking ovens, and in storage cellars. Second Lieutenant Bossert, with an assault detachment of 9th Company, tackled the T-34s with old Russian anti-tank mines.
When the day dawned the 3rd Battalion was still hanging on to the ruins of Yushkovo. Six T-34s lay in the village, gutted or shot up. The Russian infantry did not come again. The attack had been repulsed. But it was also clear that there could be no question of a further advance towards Moscow. The men were finished. Seventy seriously wounded were lying in the icy potato cellars. The order came through to abandon Yushkovo and to withdraw again behind the Nara. It was the hour when the whole of Fourth Army suspended its offensive and recalled its spearheads to the starting-lines.
Cheers. Raúl M
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by Denis1973 on 19 Jan 2009 21:11 
. Maybe anybody else help us?
