In Europe (84 page)

For Albert Speer, the crucial turning point had come much earlier, in late January, with the fall of Silesia: a region full of mines, foundries and steel factories. It was then that he understood that within a few weeks the German war economy would grind to an irretrievable halt. Yet he calmly continued to take part in the broadcasting of comforting reports. Arms production would ‘run like clockwork’, all kinds of new weapons were on their way: he hinted at things including rockets and jet fighters.

Speer did all this on purpose, as he explained later during interrogations, because the Nazi leaders had ‘started becoming hysterical’ in late March 1945. They were on the point of causing great destruction within Germany itself, in accordance with the ‘scorched earth’ tactics ordered by Hitler. Speer did everything he could to prevent the implementation of this
Nerobefehl
, and to a certain extent he succeeded. Meanwhile, on 13 March, Hitler's right-hand man Martin Bormann had ordered all prisoners to be transferred from zones along the fronts to the middle of the Reich. Gruesome death marches followed during which many tens of thousands of prisoners – some estimates speak of 250,000 – were shot or hanged. There were even plans to continue fighting underground after the defeat: the Nazi leaders had started planning Operation Werwolf in autumn 1944, and within the SS as well there were attempts to set up a partisan army through the
SS-Jagdverbände
.

Hitler issued his
Nerobefehl
on 19 March, twelve days after the Americans crossed the Rhine at Remagen. For Speer, who had protested, he had made the exception of providing a written justification of his order: ‘If the war is lost, the people will be lost as well, [and] then you must not worry about what will be needed for rudimentary survival. On the contrary, the best thing is to destroy that as well. For the nation has proven itself weak, and the future belongs entirely to the strong people of the East. Those who remain after this struggle will in any event be inferior, for the good will all be dead.’

Speer saw Hitler for the last time on the evening of Monday, 23 April. The
Führerbunker
was shaking with the impact of the mortar shells. The day before, Hitler had thrown a fit of rage before his staff the likes of which they had never seen before. He had paced back and forth, railing against the world in general and against the cowardice and disloyalty of his political friends in particular, he had pounded his fists against his temples while the tears ran down his cheeks. Speer found a way to land a light plane in the centre of Berlin. Hitler had just turned fifty-six, but he looked like an ‘exhausted octogenarian’. His complexion was ashen, he was bent and dragged his left leg behind him, probably as a result of the daily cures given him by his physician, Morell. After treating him with intestinal bacteria ‘from a Bulgarian farmer's best strains’, Morell had begun using increasingly stronger remedies: amphetamines, deadly nightshade, strychnine.

Speer spent a few hours talking to Hitler, constantly interrupted by adjutants who came and went, for official Berlin worked on until the very last moment. Hitler told him he could no longer fight on, he was giving up. He asked whether he should leave Berlin. Speer advised against it, saying the Führer could hardly end his life in a ‘summer cottage’. Hitler's greatest fear was to be captured alive by the Russians, his corpse was also to be burned, otherwise it might be ‘dishonoured’ after his death. He did not, he said with a disdainful snort, mind dying: it was only a moment. ‘I had the feeling I was talking to someone who was already dead,’ Speer wrote later in his cell.

Then Speer visited Goebbel's wife Magda, who was lying in bed sick and pale. She and her husband had decided to let their six young children die as well. After that he went and said goodbye to Eva Braun, the only one in Hitler's entourage who spoke of death's approach in a calm and dignified fashion. Early the next morning Speer flew over the Brandenburg Gate, right past the Siegesalle, and everywhere below he saw the flash of artillery, tracer bullets flying up and the city aglow. A few hours later our anonymous diarist reported a direct hit in a line waiting in front of a butcher's: three dead, ten wounded, but the line regrouped. ‘For the prospect of a few steaks and ham, even the weakest of grandmothers will stand her ground.’ Everyone in her building was now more or less living together in the bomb shelter, and came out only
when it was absolutely essential. On Thursday morning, 26 April, an artillery shell – a
Koffer
– crashed through the roof of the building. At first everyone screamed and panicked, but then they all ran upstairs to tidy up while the shells exploded all around. Such scenes were reported later, too: sweeping up the shrapnel as quickly as possible, dusting and then a mop over the floor. The cleaning fits of the women of Berlin were indefatigable.

Out on the street the diarist saw the last German soldiers retreating from the front aboard a truck, tired and silent. This was what remained of the Nazi myth. She wrote: ‘I notice again and again these days that my feeling, the feeling of all the women towards the men, is changing. They make us feel sad, they're so pitiful and powerless. The weaker sex.’

On Friday, 27 April, hiding beside the window at 5 a.m., she sees the first Russian soldiers enter her street; two men with broad backs, wearing leather coats. A piece of heavy artillery was being pulled around the corner. A few hours later the street was full of cars, carts and carefree soldiers, a field kitchen was set up, there was even a cow walking around. That afternoon the first Russian broke into the house, that evening she was raped for the first time, on the steps, while the neighbours held the cellar door shut. More soldiers followed: ‘My heart pounds like crazy. I whisper, I beg: “Only one, please, please, only one. You, if need be. But throw the others out.”’

That Friday evening the first Americans reached Berlin: two journalists, Andrew Tully of the
Boston Traveler
and Virginia Irwin of the
St Louis Dispatch
, with their driver, Sergeant John Wilson. On Wednesday, 25 April, while the American-Russian feast of fraternisation at Torgau was still in full swing, the two had decided on a half-drunken whim to drive their jeep straight on to the capital. Amid all the confusion, they actually succeeded. They had taken an American flag with them from Torgau, talked their way past all the roadblocks, drove blindly down roads lined with corpses and wrecked vehicles, and finally arrived at the Berlin headquarters of Major Nikolai Kovaleski. In all innocence, Kovaleski arranged a festive banquet to welcome the three Americans – an act of hospitality for which he would later pay dearly, for Stalin was not at all fond of such ‘conspiracies’.

Virginia Irwin saw Berlin as a ‘maelstrom of destruction’. The Soviet artillery was pounding the city's heart without interruption. The journalists received a guided tour from a Russian soldier, ‘a wild boy with a big fur cap’ who jumped onto the hood of their jeep and pointed the way with an enormous rifle. ‘The earth shakes. The air reeks of gunpowder and corpses. All of Berlin is in chaos. The fierce Russian infantry is pushing on towards the centre. Runaway horses which have escaped the supply wagons are roaming the streets. There are dead Germans everywhere.’ After a while the soldier jumped down off the jeep, shook hands with them and joined a group of infantrymen on their way into the burning, shuddering centre of the city.

The next morning, Saturday, 28 April, it was party time again. The Soviet officers, war medals clinking on their chests, waltzed with Virginia Irwin and the female soldiers to the strains of ‘Kannst Du Mir Gut Sein’ and ‘Love and Kisses’. Meanwhile orderlies ran in and out, asked for instructions, and went back to the fighting in the streets. Nightmarish things were taking place outside: the SS had flooded U-Bahn stations with hospital trains in them and entered houses flying the white flag of surrender near Kurfürstendamm, shooting everyone in them. There was a bloody massacre on the Charlottenbrücke, where a panicked crowd of civilians and soldiers was trying to make its final escape amid the incoming Soviet shells. An anonymous German soldier wrote in his diary: ‘Through the holes in the street you can see the U-Bahn tunnels. It looks as though the dead are piled on top of each other down there.’

On the night of 29 April, Hitler married Eva Braun. A macabre party was held in the
Führerbunker
, while Hitler dictated his political last will and testament to Fräulein Junge in one of the antechambers.

Outside, the Battle of Berlin was raging. Upstairs, in the cellars of the
Reichskanselerei
, an orgy was in full swing. Junge, who had gone up to get some food, saw ‘bodies in lustful embrace’ everywhere, even in a dentist's chair. During those final hours, her primary task was to care for Goebbels’ children. At around 3 p.m. on Monday, 30 April, she was making bread and jam for them. ‘The children were cheerful, they felt completely safe with eleven metres of concrete above their heads, they were counting the explosions,’ she said much later. ‘Suddenly we hear a loud bang. ‘A direct hit!’ little Helmut Goebbels shouted. That was
probably the sound of the shot with which Hitler took his own life.’ Eva had already swallowed a cyanide capsule. On 1 May, Joseph and Magda Goebbels committed suicide as well; the children were each given a capsule in their sleep. Along with a colleague, Junge – disguised as a man – was able to escape from the bunker and make it past the enemy lines.

Virginia Irwin asked Major Kovaleski whether Berlin was the biggest battle he had ever fought in. ‘He smiled and said sadly: ‘No. We have seen bigger battles. We lost our wives and children in them.’ And then the major told the story of the strange staff he had gathered around him. Each and every officer on it had lost his entire family to the Germans.’

The diary of the anonymous woman of Berlin was only published in Germany after her death, almost sixty years after the Battle of Berlin. The book was an immediate success, and rightly so, because it is recognisable, intelligent and evocative. At the same time, however, it is a document full of blind spots, and that is probably characteristic of the people of Berlin in those days. Nowhere is there a glimmer of understanding concerning the cause of all this Russian brutality. Major Kovaleski knew exactly why he was fighting in Berlin. Many of the young Soviet soldiers carried a photo of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, the young female partisan who had been tortured and hanged by the Germans in 1941. The words ‘For Zoya’ were also written on Soviet tanks and planes.

To our Berlin diarist, the war seemed merely a lightning bolt of fate. When her Gerd shows up at her door, totally unexpected, on Saturday afternoon, 16 June, they look at each other ‘like two ghosts’. She is feverish with happiness, but it soon turns out that they have become complete strangers to each other in the months that have passed. When she tells him how she and the pharmacist's wife had survived, by keeping a Russian officer as their ‘steady boyfriend’, he becomes angry: ‘You've become shameless bitches, all of you in this house.’ She shows Gerd her diary, which fills three notebooks by then, all of it written for him. He grows increasingly cool, asks her what the abbreviation ‘Schdg’ means. ‘I had to laugh: “Well,
Schändung
[rape], of course.” He looks at me as though I have lost my mind, says no more. He left yesterday. He and a comrade
of his are planning to wander the countryside, to go and visit his comrade's parents in Pomerania. He's going to try to find food. I don't know if he'll ever come back.’

And this is how the anonymous diary ends, on Friday, 22 June, 1945. ‘No more entries. And I am not going to write any more, the time for that is over …’

FOR MARTHA GELLHORN, THE MEETING WITH THE RUSSIANS AT
Torgau meant the end of the war. That same week, on 30 April, 1945, her colleague Lee Miller took a picture of herself for
Vogue
, sitting in the bathtub of Hitler's apartment in Munich, her GI boots beside the bath; finished, over and out, the most wonderful photograph of the liberation ever.

For Anna Smirnova, who had lived through the siege of Leningrad, that spring was the loveliest of her life. ‘My husband was alive, I was expecting a child, everything was going to be all right.’

The Polish communist Vladislav Matwin attended the victory parade on Red Square. ‘A Russian officer was marching with a captured German flag, and he swung that thing over the street like a broom, flap, flap, at every step. And there were forty officers doing the same thing. It was the most festive day of my life.’

Victor Klemperer had liberated himself long before: early the same morning, after he had survived the bombardment of Dresden and found his wife again, he decided to take off his yellow Star of David and await the end of the war as a ‘normal’ German refugee. Eva removed the star from his jacket with a penknife.

Winrich Behr spent the final months of the war serving under Field Marshal Model, a typical Prussian military man who carried the adage ‘generals do not involve themselves in politics’ to its logical extreme. On 21 April, 1945 they found themselves in a forest, with the Americans close by. Model said: ‘I'm not going to walk out of these woods with my hands up, not after thousands of my men have died following my orders.’ He sent Behr away, ostensibly to scout out the surroundings.
‘When I came back, he had put a bullet through his head. That same day a comrade and I escaped in civilian clothes.’

For Wolf Jobst Siedler, the war ended on 2 May alongside a road in Italy. ‘We Germans stood there with a white flag, but the British tanks just rolled on by, it was one huge thundering herd. No one wanted us!’

Within only a few months, the four great leaders of the war – with the exception of Stalin – disappeared from the political arena. Roosevelt did not live to see the German capitulation: he died of a brain haemorrhage on 12 April, 1945. De Gaulle became the president of a provisional government. In that role, and with an eye to French unity in the future, he did his best to prevent retaliations against the Vichy supporters. That soon led to a conflict with the former Resistance fighters. When elections were held in October 1945, France once again proved to be deeply divided. To break the impasse, de Gaulle announced his resignation on 20 January, 1946. He was convinced that the French, shocked, would call him back and surround him with more power and glory than before. But he was mistaken: they let him retire in peace to his country home at Colombey-les-Deux-Églises. It was twelve years before France would call on the general once more.