The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] (78 page)

The general returns. He was not gone long. Apparently the bottle was nearer at hand than Stalin expected.

The glasses and bottle are set on the desk. The general steps back, allowing Stalin to pour. Stalin unstoppers the unlabeled bottle.

He pours only a little in both glasses, then raises one. The general lifts the second glass. Stalin faces the soldier across the ordered desk and Eisenhower’s telegram.

Stalin says, ”I will require the Americans, British, and French to fly back to Berlin with the Nazi leadership. I refuse to accept the surrender signed this morning as genuine.”

“Comrade?”

“I did not approve the document in advance. The Soviet Union was not represented by a suitable envoy. And the ceremony took place in France.”

The general is stock-still. The glass is held out like a crystal nest in a tree.

“In France.” Stalin shakes his head, disbelieving. He is wasting himself on this general, this man. He will not react. Stalin finds it all humorous now. Ah, well.

“Another act of surrender will be signed by all parties at the Red Army headquarters in Karlshorst. This is where history will mark the final victory over the Nazis, not some office building in France of Eisenhowers choosing. You will see to it that Zhukov is present, a proper figure to represent the Soviet Union. Understood?”

“Yes, Comrade.”

“Well, then. Let us make our toast. Would you like to say something, General?”

“I should be honored to drink to Comrade Stalin’s toast.”

“All right, then. Let me see.”

Stalin runs thumb and fingers over his moustache. He rounds his lips in thought.

“We’ll stay simple. There’s still work to be done before breakfast.”

“Of course, Comrade.”

Stalin hoists his glass. The general follows suit.

“Today the world celebrates. Today we Russians embrace the Americans and the English. Our fighting allies. First, to Roosevelt, our missing friend.”

Stalin drinks. The general tosses his down. The vodka goes right to Stalin’s eyes, raising false tears.

He holds out his glass for the general to pour. The man is timid with the bottle, he barely wets the bottoms.

“Come, General. Mr. Churchill is next. He would be ashamed of us if we were to drink so little on his behalf.”

The officer adds more to each glass.

Stalin lifts his and grins. “To that Churchill. His health.”

Both men drain their glasses. The vodka makes Stalin blink. The general holds his liquor well.

Stalin sets his glass on the desk.

“Thank you, General.”

“Comrade.”

The officer collects the glasses and bottle. Stalin lets him almost reach the door.

“General.”

“Yes, Comrade Stalin?”

“Have Susloparov recalled immediately.”

A glass bounces on the carpet.

Stalin sits behind his desk. The officer has not moved.

Stalin doesn’t care. He’ll have no trouble taking this man’s head as well.

He waves the soldier out of his office.

“It’s war, General.”

illy brandt, mayor of west berlin from i957 to
1966
and West German chancellor from 1969 to 1972, wrote in his memoir: “In April 1945, the Americans had stopped at the Elbe; if they had marched on they would have saved themselves a good deal of trouble and given the world a different face. But they left the triumph of marching into Hitlers capital to the Russians. One reason was that Gen. Eisenhower no longer considered Berlin an especially important objective. He failed to understand the symbolic value of the place. ... At the end of the 1950s, when I broached the topic with Eisenhower, then President of the United States, he freely admitted that he had not foreseen the consequences of his order not to advance on Berlin.”

General Omar Bradley, whose army group was directed southeast to cut off the supposed Nazi National Redoubt rather than support an assault on Berlin, expressed puzzlement in later years that he and the rest of the American leadership should have been taken in by the myth of the Redoubt.

There are no official figures for the number of Berlin women raped by occupying Soviet soldiers. Nonetheless, the amount and frequency of rape was staggering. Estimates exceed 300,000 women in the city who suffered this fate, primarily in retaliation for similar abuses reported against German soldiers while on Russian soil. With typical bravura and humor, Berliner women tried to defuse their horror with a quip: “It’s better to have a Russian on the belly than an American on the head,” meaning sexual assault was a preferable fate to dying beneath an Allied bomb.

When faced with complaints about the conduct of his troops, Stalin once replied: “Can’t you understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometers through blood and fire has fun with a woman or takes a trifle?”

At the end of the war, the Jewish population in Berlin had been cut down from 160,000 in 1933 to 1,500 men, women, and children, all “U-boats” hidden and abetted by courageous German citizens.

The Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, which refused to flee the city, survived the final battle intact and played its first postwar concert at the Titania Palace on May 26, just eighteen days after the city’s fall. Directed by Leo Borchard, the BPO’s program included pieces by Mozart, Mendelssohn, and the Russian composer Tchaikovsky.

In August 1945, the concentration camp north of Berlin at Sachsenhausen was turned against its former keepers. Nazi functionaries were held in the camp by their Red captors, as were several thousand political undesirables. Until it was closed in 1950, Sachsenhausen became the largest of the special camps in the Soviet Zone of Occupation. At least twelve thousand of the sixty thousand Germans who suffered imprisonment there after the war died of malnutrition and disease.

Franklin Roosevelt has been evaluated by modern historians as arguably the finest American President of the twentieth century. His death was caused by a severe brain hemorrhage. No other President will again serve four terms.

Winston Churchill was turned out of office on July 26, 1945, barely eleven weeks after the war ended. In 1951 he was again named Prime Minister, serving until 1955. An able and prolific historian, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was knighted in 1953. Churchill died in 1965 at the age of ninety.

Josef Stalin died of complications from a stroke in 1953. Although the nation was plunged into grief, Stalin’s political successors expressed relief and moved quickly to reverse some of the cruelest features of his regime. Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s methods of rule and political theories. Stalin’s name was purged, allowing history to brand him one of the most brutal dictators the world has endured.

Upon his return to Moscow, General Susloparov, the Soviet general who signed the German surrender in France without Stalin’s permission, was executed.