The Fall of Berlin 1945 (18 page)

9
Objective Berlin

On 8 March, just when the Pomeranian operation was getting into full momentum, Stalin suddenly summoned Zhukov back to Moscow. It was a strange moment to drag a Front commander away from his headquarters. Zhukov drove straight from the central airport out to Stalin's dacha, where the Soviet leader was recuperating from exhaustion and stress.

After Zhukov had reported on the Pomeranian operation and the fighting in the Oder bridgeheads, Stalin led him outside for a walk in the grounds. He talked about his childhood. When they returned to the dacha for tea, Zhukov asked Stalin if anything had been heard of his son Yakov Djugashvili, who had been a prisoner of the Germans since 1941. Stalin had disowned his own son then for having allowed himself to be taken alive, but now his attitude seemed different. He did not answer Zhukov's question for some time. 'Yakov is never going to get out of prison alive,' he said eventually. 'The murderers will shoot him. According to our inquiries, they are keeping him isolated and are trying to persuade him to betray the Motherland.' He was silent for another long moment. 'No,' he said firmly. 'Yakov would prefer any kind of death to betraying the Motherland.'

When Stalin referred to 'our inquiries', they were of course Abakumov's inquiries. The most recent news of Yakov had come from General Stepanovic, a commander of the Yugoslav gendarmerie. Stepanovic had been released by Zhukov's own troops at the end of January, but then grabbed by SMERSH for interrogation. Stepanovic had earlier been in Straflager X-C in Lubeck with Senior Lieutenant Djugashvili. According to Stepanovic, Yakov had conducted himself 'independently and proudly'. He refused to stand up if a German officer entered his room and turned his back if they spoke to him. The Germans had put him in a punishment cell. Despite an interview printed in the German press, Yakov Djugashvili insisted that he had never replied to any question from anyone. After an escape from the camp, he was taken away and flown to an unknown destination. To this day, the manner of his death is not clear, although the most common story is that he threw himself at the perimeter fence to force the guards to shoot him. Stalin may have changed his attitude towards his own son, but he remained pitiless towards the hundreds of thousands of other Soviet prisoners of war who had in most cases suffered an even worse fate than Yakov.

Stalin changed the subject. He said that he was 'very pleased' with the results of the Yalta conference. Roosevelt had been most friendly. Stalin's secretary, Poskrebyshev, then came in with papers for Stalin to sign. This was a signal for Zhukov to leave, yet it was also the moment for Stalin to explain the reason for the urgent summons to Moscow. 'Go to the
Stavka,'
he told Zhukov, 'and look at the calculations on the Berlin operation with Antonov. We will meet here tomorrow at 13.00.' Antonov and Zhukov, who evidently sensed that there was a reason for the urgency, worked through the night. Next morning, Stalin changed both the time and the place. He came into Moscow, despite his weak state, so that a full-scale conference could take place at the
Stavka
with Malenkov, Molotov and other members of the State Defence Committee. Antonov made his presentation. When he had finished, Stalin gave his approval and told him to issue the orders for detailed planning.

Zhukov acknowledged in his memoirs that 'when we were working on the Berlin operation we took into account the action of our allies'. He even admitted their concern that 'the British command was still nursing the dream of capturing Berlin before the Red Army reached it'. What he does not mention, however, was that on 7 March, the day before Stalin summoned him so urgently to Moscow, the US Army had seized the bridge at Remagen. Stalin had immediately seen the implications of the Western Allies breaching the Rhine barrier so quickly.

The British desire to head for Berlin had never been concealed from Stalin. During Churchill's visit to Moscow in October 1944, Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke told Stalin that after an encirclement of the Ruhr, 'the main axis of the Allied advance would then be directed on Berlin'. Churchill had re-emphasized the point. They hoped to cut off about 150,000 Germans in Holland, 'then drive steadily towards Berlin'. Stalin had made no comment.

There was a very strong reason for Stalin to want the Red Army to occupy Berlin first. In May 1942, three months before the start of the battle of Stalingrad, he had summoned Beria and the leading atomic- physicists to his dacha. He was furious to have heard through spies that the United States and Britain were working on a uranium bomb. Stalin blamed Soviet scientists for not having taken the threat seriously, yet he was the one who had dismissed as a 'provocation' the first intelligence on the subject. This had come from the British traitor John Cairncross in November 1941. Stalin's angry dismissal of the information had been a curious repeat of his behaviour when warned of the German invasion six months before.

Over the next three years, the Soviet nuclear research programme, soon codenamed Operation Borodino, was dramatically accelerated with detailed research information from the Manhattan Project provided by Communist sympathizers, such as Klaus Fuchs. Beria himself took over supervision of the work and eventually brought Professor Igor Kurchatov's team of scientists under complete NKVD control. The Soviet programme's main handicap, however, was a lack of uranium. No deposits had been identified yet in the Soviet Union. The main reserves in Europe lay in Saxony and Czechoslovakia, under Nazi control, but before the Red Army reached Berlin they appear to have had only the sketchiest information on the deposits there. On Beria's instructions, the Soviet Purchasing Committee in the United States asked the American War Production Board to sell it eight tons of uranium oxide. After consultation with Major General Groves, the head of the Manhattan Project, the US government authorized purely token supplies, mainly in the hope of finding out what the Soviet Union was up to.

Uranium deposits were discovered in Kazakhstan in 1945, but still in insufficient quantities. Stalin and Beria's greatest hope of getting the project moving ahead rapidly therefore lay in seizing German supplies of uranium before the Western Allies got to them. Beria had discovered from Soviet scientists who had worked there that the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Dahlem, a south-western suburb of Berlin, was the centre of German atomic research. Work was carried out there in a lead-lined bunker known as the 'Virus House', a codename designed to discourage outside interest. Next to this bunker stood the Blitzturm, or 'tower of lightning', which housed a cyclotron capable of creating 1.5 million volts. Beria, however, did not know that most of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute's scientists, equipment and material, including seven tons of uranium oxide, had been evacuated to Haigerloch in the Black Forest. But a German bureaucratic mix-up had led to a further consignment being sent to Dahlem instead of Haigerloch. The rush for Dahlem was not to be entirely in vain.

There had never been any doubt in the minds of the Nazi leadership that the fight for Berlin would be the climax of the war. 'The National Socialists,' Goebbels had always insisted, 'will either win together in Berlin or die together in Berlin.' Perhaps unaware that he was para- phrasing Karl Marx, he used to declare that 'whoever possesses Berlin possesses Germany'. Stalin, on the other hand, undoubtedly knew the rest of Marx's quote: 'And whoever controls Germany, controls Europe.' The American war leaders, however, were clearly unfamiliar with such European dicta. It was perhaps this ignorance of European power politics which provoked Brooke into his uncharitable opinion after a working breakfast with Eisenhower in London on 6 March: 'There is no doubt that he [Eisenhower] is a most attractive personality and at the same time [has] a very very limited brain from a strategic point of view.' The basic problem, which Brooke did not fully acknowledge, was that the Americans at that stage simply did not view Europe in strategic terms. They had a simple and limited objective: to win the war against Germany quickly, with as few casualties as possible, and then concentrate on Japan. Eisenhower — like his President, the chiefs of staff and other senior officials — failed to look ahead and completely misread Stalin's character. This exasperated British colleagues and led to the main rift in the western alliance. Some British officers even referred to Eisenhower's deference to Stalin as 'Have a Go, Joe', a call used by London prostitutes when soliciting American soldiers.

On 2 March, Eisenhower signalled to Major General John R. Deane, the US liaison officer in Moscow, 'In view of" the great progress of the Soviet offensive, is there likely to be any major change in Soviet plans from those explained to Tedder [on 15 January]?' He then asked whether there would be 'a lull in operations mid-March to mid-May'. But Deane found it impossible to obtain any reliable information from General Antonov. And when finally they did state their intentions, they deliber- ately misled Eisenhower to conceal their determination to seize Berlin first.

In the difference of views over strategy, personalities unavoidably played a large part. Eisenhower suspected that Montgomery's demands to be allowed to lead a single, full-blooded thrust towards Berlin were prompted solely by prima donna ambitions. Montgomery had done little to conceal his conviction that he should be the field commander while Eisenhower was left in a figurehead position. Above all, Montgomery's unforgivable boasting after the Ardennes battle had clearly entrenched Eisenhower's bad opinion of him. 'His relations with Monty are quite insoluble,' Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke wrote in his diary after that breakfast meeting on 6 March. 'He only sees the worst side of Monty.' Yet the Americans, with some justification, felt that Montgomery would in any case be the worst choice to lead a rapid thrust. He was so notoriously pedantic about staff details that he took longer than any other general to mount an attack.

Montgomery's 21st Army Group in the north at Wesel faced the greatest concentration of German troops. He therefore planned a set-piece crossing of the Rhine with large-scale amphibious and airborne operations. But his minutely prepared performance was rather pre- empted by events further south. Hitler's frenzied reaction to the US First Army's rapidly reinforced bridgehead at Remagen was to order massive counter-attacks. This stripped other sectors of the Rhine. Soon, Patton's Third Army, which had been clearing the Palatinate with a panache reminiscent of that local cavalry leader Prince Rupert, was across the river at a number of points south of Koblenz.

Once Montgomery's 21st Army Group had also crossed the Rhine on the morning of 24 March, Eisenhower, Churchill and Brooke met on the banks of the river in euphoric mood. Montgomery believed that Eisenhower would allow him to charge north-eastwards towards the Baltic coast at Lübeck and perhaps even Berlin. He was soon disabused. General Hodges had been building up the Remagen bridgehead and Patton, in a remarkably short time, had developed his main bridgehead south of Mainz. Eisenhower ordered them to converge their attacks eastwards before Hodges's First Army swung left to encircle the Ruhr from the south. He then, to Montgomery's utter dismay, detached Simpson's Ninth Army from his 21st Army Group and ordered Montgomery to head for Hamburg and Denmark, not for Berlin. The US Ninth Army was to form the northern part of the Ruhr operation to surround Field Marshal Model's Army Group defending Germany's last industrial region. The greatest blow to British hopes of a push north-eastwards towards Berlin was Eisenhower's decision on 30 March to concentrate efforts on central and southern Germany.

Bradley's 12th Army Group, augmented by the Ninth Army, was to cross the centre of Germany as soon as it had secured the Ruhr to head for Leipzig and Dresden. In the south, General Devers's 6th Army Group would head for Bavaria and northern Austria. Then, to the anger of the British chiefs of staff, who had not been consulted about the important change of emphasis in the overall plan, Eisenhower communicated its details to Stalin at the end of March without telling them or his British deputy, Air Chief Marshal Tedder. This signal, known as SCAF-252, became a bitter issue between the two allies.

Eisenhower weighted his attack southwards partly because he was convinced that Hitler would withdraw his armies to Bavaria and north-western Austria for a last-ditch defence of an Alpenfestung, or Alpine Fortress. He conceded later in his memoirs that Berlin was 'politically and psychologically important as the symbol of remaining German power', but he believed that 'it was not the logical nor the most desirable objective for the forces of the Western Allies'. He justified this decision on the grounds that the Red Army on the Oder was much closer and the logistic effort would have meant holding up his central and southern armies, and his objective of meeting up with the Red Army to split Germany in two.

On the banks of the Rhine only six days before Churchill had hoped that 'our armies will advance against little or no opposition and will reach the Elbe, or even Berlin, before the Bear'. He was now thoroughly dismayed. It seemed as if Eisenhower and Marshall were far too concerned with placating Stalin. The Soviet authorities were apparently furious about American fighters shooting down a number of their aircraft in a dogfight. Their reaction was in strong contrast to Stalin's remarks to Tedder in January that such accidents were bound to happen in war.

The incident had taken place on 18 March between Berlin and Küstrin. The US Air Force fighter pilots thought that they had engaged eight German aircraft and claimed two Focke-Wulf 190s destroyed. Red Army aviation, on the other hand, asserted that the eight aircraft were Soviet and that six of them had been shot down, with two of their flyers killed and one seriously wounded. The mistake was blamed on the 'criminal action of individuals of the American air force'.

Ironically, it was the Americans, in the form of Allen Dulles of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) in Berne, who provoked the biggest row with the Soviet Union at this time. Dulles had been approached by SS Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff about an armistice in north Italy. The Soviet leadership's demands to participate in the talks were rejected in case Wolff might break them off. This was a blunder. Churchill acknowledged that the Soviet Union was understandably alarmed. Stalin clearly feared a separate peace on the Western Front. His recurrent nightmare was a revived Wehrmacht supplied by the Americans, even if this was an illogical fear. The vast majority of Germany's most formidable formations had either been destroyed, captured or surrounded, and even if the Americans had provided all the weapons in the world, the Wehrmacht in 1945 bore little resemblance to the fighting machine of 1941.