Armageddon (112 page)

“Captain Walter Schaefer-Kuhnert”: AI Walter Schaefer-Kuhnert.

“Moser and his young comrades”: AI Hans Moser.

“Captain Mackert, one of its battalion”: H. Spaeter and W. Schramm,
Die Geschichte des Panzerkorps Grossdeutschland
(Bielefeld: 1958), p. 665.

“The atmosphere was truly hopeless”: Tiemann, op. cit., pp. 277–8.

“At the makeshift hospital in the school”: AI Melany Borck.

“The flares being dropped by aircraft”: Fleming MS, IWM.

“Lieutenant Philip Dark”: Philip Dark MS, IWM.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: “THE EARTH WILL SHAKE AS WE LEAVE THE SCENE”

“I was a professional—I had to do my duty”: AI Karl-Günther von Hase.

“Suddenly, Krulik saw an 85mm anti-tank”: AI Valentin Krulik.

“We were at the end of our physical strength”: Meyer, op. cit., p. 302.

“The situation is hopeless”: BA, RH2/336.

“Our problem in 1945”: AI Valentin Krulik.

“The garrison of Vienna”: BA, RH2/336.

“He was a son of East Prussia”: K. Dieckert and H. Grossman,
Der Kampf um Ost-preussen
(Munich: Gräfe und Unzer, 1960), p. 165.

“I still believe in some kind of miracle”: Quoted J. Thorwald,
Es begann an der Weichsel
(Stuttgart: Steingrüber: 1950), p. 262.

“On 12 March, Russians found sixteen members”: RMDA, vol. xv 4/5, pp. 211–12, 2nd Belorussian Front report of 3.12.45.

“Many Germans in areas we have occupied”: Ibid., report of 4.4.45, p. 213.

“A gun would fire”: M. E. Katukov,
Na Ostrie Glavnovo Udara,
2nd edn. (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1976), p. 386.

“Lieutenant Gennady Ivanov”: AI Gennady Ivanov.

“The colonel looked about inquisitively”: H. Schaufler,
1945 . . . Panzer an der Weichsel
(Stuttgart: Motorbuch-Verlag, 1979), p. 102.

“Fourteen-year-old Erich Pusch”: AI Erich Pusch.

“Twenty-five-year-old Frieda Engler”: AI Elfi Kowitz.

“The Russians swept into the air-raid shelter”: AI Anita Bartsch.

“The whole place stank of corpses”: AI Vasily Krylov.

“It was very difficult to maintain order”: AI Fyodor Romanovsky.

“Yelena Kogan’s commanding officer”: AI Yelena Kogan.

“preposterous . . . I used such argumentative”: Guderian, op. cit., p. 402.

“If all our gauleiters in the east”: Heiber and Glantz, op. cit., p. 672.

“we saw it as our death sentence”: AI Karl Godau.

“This petty officer is certain of my full”:
Ostseebefebl,
Nr. 19, 4.19.45, IWM.

“his fists raised, his cheeks flushed”: Guderian, op. cit., pp. 414–15.

“No German town will be declared”: BA, RH2/336.

“a joke. These are Indians who”: Heiber and Glantz, op. cit., pp. 711–12.

“One of the last signals to OKH”: BA, RH2/336.

“I found myself commanding men of sixty”: AI Tony Saurma.

“As an inglorious refugee from Berlin”: Heiber and Glantz, op. cit., p. 722.

“Everyone now has a chance to choose”: Rudolf Semmler,
Goebbels: The Man Next to Hitler
(Westhouse: 1947), p. 194.

“In the last days of the war”: Temkin, op. cit., p. 215.

“We’d all had enough”: AI Nikolai Ponomarev.

“In the last month, especially”: AI Vladimir Gormin.

“Many have proved unstable in action”: Ministry of Defence Archives,
The Great Patriotic War,
ed. Major-General V. A. Zolotarev (Terra: 1995), vol. xv 4/5, p. 152.

“betrayed us in 1941 and they will betray”: Ibid., p. 153.

“They don’t look like soldiers”: Ibid.

“I wanted to fight, because everybody else”: AI Nikolai Dubrovsky.

“Many Germans seemed to feel that”: AI Pavel Nikiforov.

“a change of attitude towards prisoners”: RMDA, vol. xv 4/5, p. 120.

“I shall never forgive Zhukov for that folly”: AI Yury Ryakhovsky.

“I never thought I’d make it”: AI Vasily Filimonenko.

“A Sergeant Safronov reported seeing”: RMDA, vol. xv 4/5, p. 95.

“The divisional engineer Lieutenant-Colonel Lomov”: Ibid., p. 89, Political Department Report of 4.18.45.

“The further we got”: AI Vasily Filimonenko.

“nineteen-year-old Helga Braunschweig”: While all other names given in the text of this book are authentic, this woman asked for her identity to be protected by a pseudonym, because of embarrassment about her account of rape by the Russians.

“Any commander who shows himself”: Quoted RMDA, vol. xv 4/5, p. 95.

“Marshal Zhukov’s troops are now within”: Ibid., p. 160, 4.20.45.

“In the course of three days the infantry”: Ibid., p. 96.

“Due to the slowness of our advance”: Ibid., p. 515.

“In Wilmersdorf, the local situation”: Brigadier J. S. W. Stone Papers, LHA.

“Owing to the gravity”: PRO, HW/13715, Ultra.

“The first really wounded man”: Stone Papers, LHA.

“Third Guards Tank Army is conducting”: RMDA, vol. xv 5/4, p. 160.

“I keep being told that operations”: Ibid., p. 101.

“She’s English!”: Stone Papers, LHA.

“The enemy knows I am here”: Heiber and Glantz, op. cit., pp. 718–19.

“Today I will lie down a little more”: Ibid., p. 730.

“The whole scene was apocalyptic”: AI Yelena Kogan.

“commanders are taking serious steps”: RMDA, vol. xv 5/4, pp. 245–6, report of 5.2.45.

“It was crazy!”: AI Bruno Bochum.

“Johannes and Regina Krakowitz seldom”: AI Regina Krakowitz.

“A deputation of diplomats from the Japanese”: RSA, 9401 om.2 g.95 1–1 283.

“A Wehrmacht officer emerged”: RMDA, vol. xv 5/4, p. 223, report of 4.24.45.

“Thank God there will be no more bombing”: AI Regina Krakowitz.

“Was pushed to the ground”: Margrit Hug diary loaned to the author.

“The Germans who fought to the last”: AI Yury Ryakhovsky.

“It seemed so strange, when the end”: AI Vasily Filimonenko.

“I disliked the idea of behaving”: AI Yury Ryakhovsky.

“I was here, too”: AI Vasily Krylov.

“Mutti decided she did not want”: Stone Papers, LHA, anon. narrative.

“Nothing is left of Berlin but memories”: Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham eds.,
Nazism 1919–45
(Exeter University Press: 1974), 4 doc. 1397, p. 667.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN: THE BITTER END

“The Germany in which we found ourselves”: Moorehead, op. cit., p. 260.

“It was bitter to learn that Goebbels’s”: von Stemann MS, op. cit.

“People had so much hatred”: AI Valentin Krulik.

“No German soldier would have behaved”: AI Hans Siwik.

“Red soldiers during the first weeks”:
Congressional Record,
U.S. Senate, 12.4.45, p. 11,374.

“On the night of 2 May”: RSA, 9401 om.2 g.95 1–1 294.

“Vlassov’s men were kicked to death”: AI Gennady Ivanov.

“A day or two before the end”: AI Valentin Krulik.

“Yelena Kogan, the NKVD interpreter”: AI Yelena Kogan.

“Let us not kid ourselves”: AI Vasily Filimonenko.

“What the Red Army did in Germany”: AI Yelena Kogan.

“The British people were surprised”: Fraser, op. cit., p. 257.

“Dorothea Goesse, wife of an Austrian”: AI Leopold Goesse.

“I did not mourn Hitler”: AI Karl Godau.

“I knew nothing about the Holocaust”: AI Maria Brauwers.

“Corporal Helmut Fromm”: AI Helmut Fromm.

“The fourteen-year-olds were very dangerous”: AI W. F. Deedes.

“we felt like butchers”: Walter L. Brown,
Up Front with US
(privately published: 1979), p. 490.

“The rules of war got very fractured”: AI W. F. Deedes.

“After a certain amount of argument”: Neave Diary, op. cit.

“They always put on their best”: Ron Gladman,
Citizen Soldier
(West Somerset Free Press: 1995), p. 63.

“Field-Marshal von Manstein”: Alexandr Stahlberg,
Bounden Duty
(Brassey’s: 1990), p. 400.

“He told Krulik to investigate”: AI Valentin Krulik.

“An onlooker in the village of Niemegle”: von Stemann MS, op. cit.

“It’s over, men”: AI Gottfried Selzer.

“I thought it was too late now”: PM’s minute, D.121/5 4.24.45, quoted Gilbert, op. cit., p. 1310.

“looked like men in a dream”: War Diary, GSHO, 1 Cdn Corps, appendix 43.

“Flight-Lieutenant Richard Hough”: Hough, op. cit., p. 150.

“I felt a great sadness”: AI Vasily Kudryashov.

“We didn’t celebrate the end of the war”: Gladman, op. cit., p. 86.

“three beautiful Red Army reconnaissance”: AI Gennady Trofimov.

“Lieutenant Gennady Ivanov was in Rostock”: AI Gennady Ivanov.

“Inge Stolten, a Düsseldorf housewife”: AI Eggert Stolten.

“We were so indoctrinated that we had never”: AI Jutta Dietze.

“In a cell in Moscow’s Butykri prison”: AI Karl-Günther von Hase.

“Now life begins!”: AI Eleonor von Joest.

“Colonel, the war is over”: AI Vladimir Gormin.

“We did not mind doing this”: AI Waltraut Ptack.

“I suppose I should feel elated”: Cross Papers, IWM, 91/8/1.

“Everything we had fought for”: AI Hans-Otto Polluhmer.

“Every day seemed a festival”: AI Theodore Wempe.

“In a little town outside Amsterdam”: AI Bob Stompas.

“Germany and Russia have suffered”: RSA, 9401 om.2 g.96.

“If a Russian soldier violates you”: Ruth Andreas-Friedrich,
Shauplatz Berlin,
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), pp. 37–40.

“ ‘My dears,’ he said apologetically”: Mrs. A. S. C. McVean MS, IWM.

“to dive for cover in the Wehrmacht”: Peter Padfield,
Dönitz
(Cassell: 2001), p. 423.

“Martin Mutschmann, gauleiter of Saxony”: RSA, 9401 om.2 g.96.

“If the Russians get at them”: AI Gotz Bergander.

“I don’t think”: Horwell MS, op. cit.

“expected to be ill-treated”: Moorehead, op. cit., p. 221.

“You do not understand how brutal”: Harding, op. cit.

“When Corporal Harry Trinder was freed”: Harry Trinder MS, IWM, 85/8/1.

“The wife of a large estate-owner”: Ann Villiers MS, IWM.

“Soon after Texan GI Bud Lindsey”: Lindsey, op. cit.

“We had not
smelt
”: AI Klaus Fischer.

“Sixteen-year-old Corporal Helmut Fromm’s”: AI Helmut Fromm.

“The family of sixteen-year-old Hans Moser”: AI Hans Moser.

“Captain Leopold Goesse watched”: AI Leopold Goesse.

“What extraordinary people the Germans are”: AI W. F. Deedes.

“Think how many roads and railways”: RSA, 9401 om.2 g.99.

“whispered to his interpreter that he had something”: Ibid., g.97.

“Von Rundstedt, being driven as a captive”: NA, RG492–332, box 12.

“They professed to be outraged”: RSA, 9401 om.2 g.96.

“Were you a professional soldier?”: Williams, op. cit., p. 300.

“There were thousands of men”: Carl Basham MS, SA.

“The NKVD complained that such unilateral”: RSA, 9401 om.2 g.96.

“Colonel-General Hesleni”: Ibid.

“In the east, however, it was another”: RSA, 9401 om.2 g.97.

“Our men had dropped their guard”: AI Gennady Klimenko.

“At first they mobbed us”: Piotr Tareczynski MS, IWM.

“When Zinaida Mikhailova saw the first”: AI Zinaida Mikhailova.

“When Veta Kogakevich was liberated”: AI Veta Kogakevich.

“We felt too exhausted to celebrate”: Herszburg MS, op. cit.

“Nothing had prepared us for the camps”: AI Dorothy Beavers.

“Any Italians here?”: AI David Pecora.

“Why do you care for the Jews first?”: AI Henry Kissinger.

“displayed no emotion at all”: AI Cliff Pettit.

“For the last six weeks”: AI Nikolai Maslennikov.

“Sometimes we despaired for these men”: McBryde, op. cit., p. 169.

“One night the farmer with whom”: AI Jutta Dietze.