The latter part of Prit Buttar's Battleground Prussia deals with the desperate attempts by German soldiers and civilians to escape from the ports and peninsulas of East and West Prussia in early 1945. Mostly these areas had been bypassed by the Red Army as it swept on through Poland and on towards Berlin.
Buttar's book bleakly narrates how overloaded transport ships were torpedoed, how embarkation points were targetted and bombed, and how right up until the very hour of the armistice Soviet motorboats were pursuing Denmark-bound escape craft and sinking them or hauling them back to soviet controlled ports. After the armistice Sweden, famously and controversially, was pressured into handing over to the Soviets those Germans who had escaped across the Baltic at the very end of the war. Those soldiers who attempted to "break out" westwards by land were almost never successful. As we are talking about the last week or two of the war there can be no question of the Soviet authorities fearing that evacuated soldiers would regroup and become once again militarily viable.
So, the Red Army wished to cast a wide net, and that seems reasonable enough. From a judicial point of view you can see that they would prefer to "process" German soldiers themselves rather than trust to the western allies. War criminals could be identified. Captured German soldiers (and even civilians) could be put to work both locally and back in the Soviet Union itself.
Yet, Buttar's account is somewhat contradictory. Surveying the failure (apart from submarines) of the Soviet Navy to interdict the Baltic evacuations he writes
Stalin was very aware that Germans were fleeing to the west, and that the conduct of the Red Army did much to bring this flight about. It is conceivable that Stalin wanted the flight to continue, so that the residual post-war German population in territories that were to cease being part of Germany was reduced as much as possible
And certainly you can see that politically Stalin and his Polish communists had much to gain from being rid of the Germans even before the end of the war, so that the huge westward shift in the German frontier which they wanted to impose on the western allies ... could be made a fait accompli.
So did the Red Army want to capture Germans or not?