The Fall of Berlin 1945 (38 page)

It was their penultimate broadcast. The transmitter at Nauen was captured two days later.

More and more Berliners had been taking the risk of listening to the BBC on the wireless and even dared to discuss its news. But power cuts were now creating a more effective censorship of foreign broadcasts than the police state had ever achieved. London had little idea of the great Soviet offensive, but its announcement that Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg concentration camp had been liberated just north of Berlin gave a good idea of Red Army progress and its intention to encircle the city. The indication of the horrors found there was also another reminder of the vengeance which Berlin faced. This did not stop most Berliners from convincing themselves that the concentration camp stories must be enemy propaganda.

Apart from broadcasts heard on battery-operated radios and a few announcements on posters about rations, most news now came by word of mouth. Rumour and fact became even more difficult to disentangle.

A sense of nightmare unreality pervaded the city as it awaited its doom on that day of bright spring sunshine and heavy showers. Comparisons with its recent status as the imperial capital of occupied Europe were inescapable. Once grandiose buildings were reduced to mere facades, with the sky visible through the upper windows. And the decline from mechanized military power was underlined by the sight of German soldiers driving hay wagons drawn by small Polish horses.

The constant background of Kazakov's artillery bombardment set nerves on edge. People found that the phrase 'the thunder of guns' was not one of those bombastic cliches of war but an entirely accurate description. The sound rolled and echoed, especially in courtyards behind buildings, just like a storm. Everyone was afraid, but women had most to fear. An anonymous diarist recorded that although women in ration queues discussed every advance of the enemy, there was an unspoken agreement. 'Not a single woman talked about "it".'

'These are strange times,' she added in the large sales ledger which she used as her diary. 'One experiences history in the making, things which one day will fill the history books. But while living through it, everything dissolves into petty worries and fears. History is very tire- some. Tomorrow I'm going to look for nettles and try to find some coal.'

Hitler, on the other hand, had by now realized that history was all that was left to him - except that his notion of history was fatally dominated by an obsessive desire for immortality. Unlike Himmler, he did not try to change his image with concessions. If anything, his addiction to bloodshed and destruction intensified. One of the main reasons for his decision to stay on in Berlin was quite simple. The Fall of Berchtesgaden did not have quite the same ring as the Fall of Berlin. Nor did it offer the same spectacular images of smashed monuments and blazing buildings.

During the night of 21 April, Hitler had almost collapsed after ordering the Steiner counter-attack. His doctor, Morell, found him in such low spirits that he suggested an injection to revive him. Hitler went into a frenzy. He was convinced that the generals wanted to drug him with morphine and put him on a plane to Salzburg. It appears that he spent most of his days and nights in the bunker, when not in situation conferences, sitting in his room, lost in thought, often gazing at the portrait of Frederick the Great. It had become his icon.

For most of the morning of 22 April, Hitler feverishly demanded news of Steiner's attack from the north. He told General Koller, the Luftwaffe chief of staff, to send up aircraft to see if Steiner's troops had yet started to move. He contacted Himmler to ask him. The Reichsführer SS had not the slightest idea of what was going on. He and his chameleon eminence Gruppenführer Walter Schellenberg were still preoccupied with the idea of secret overtures to the Western Allies through Count Bernadotte. Himmler just made a guardedly optimistic reply, which Hitler seized upon as fact.

At the midday situation conference, however, Hitler heard for certain that Steiner had not moved. Soviet forces had also broken the perimeter defence ring in the north of the city. He began to scream and yell. The SS was betraying him now as well as the army. This rage was far worse than any of his rows with Guderian. Eventually he collapsed into an armchair, drained and weeping. He said quite openly for the first time that the war was lost. Keitel, Jodl, Krebs and Burgdorf were shaken.

Hitler went on to say that because he could not die fighting, because he was too weak, he would simply shoot himself to avoid falling into the hands of the enemy. They tried to persuade him to leave for Berchtesgaden, but he had clearly made up his mind. He ordered Keitel, Jodl and Bormann to leave for the south, but they refused. Anyone else who wanted to go could go, he told them, but he was staying in Berlin to the end. He wanted an announcement made to that effect.

Goebbels was summoned to the Reich Chancellery to help persuade him to leave, but he was the worst choice, since he was already determined to stay himself. He spoke alone with Hitler in his room for some time, trying to calm him down. When Goebbels came out, he told those waiting outside that the Führer had asked him to bring his family into the bunker. It would appear that Goebbels had told Hitler during this conversation that he and his wife, Magda, had already decided to kill their six children and then themselves.

Hitler, to the surprise of his distraught entourage, re-emerged in calmer mood. Jodl had suggested that General Wenck's Twelfth Army could be turned around from facing the Americans on the Elbe and ordered to relieve Berlin. Hitler seized on this idea. 'General Field Marshal Keitel,' wrote Jodl, 'was ordered to coordinate the actions of the Twelfth Army and the Ninth Army, which was breaking out of its encirclement.' Keitel offered to leave immediately, but Hitler insisted that he first sat down while servants brought him a meal as well as sandwiches for his journey, and half a bottle of cognac and chocolate as iron rations. Keitel then left for Wenck's headquarters and Jodl for the new OKW base at Krampnitz, north of Potsdam.

The debate over Hitler's degree of sanity or madness can never be resolved. But Colonel de Maizière, who was there on that evening of Sunday 22 April and who had observed him closely during numerous situation conferences, was convinced that 'his mental sickness consisted of a hypertrophic self-identification with the German people'. This may well explain why he felt that the population of Berlin should share his suicide. But he also seemed to experience real pleasure in casualties among his own men as well as those of the enemy. 'Losses can never be too high!' he had exclaimed to Field Marshal von Reichenau in 1942, when informed of heavy casualties in the SS
Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler
. 'They sow the seeds of future glory.'

Operation Seraglio, the evacuation to Berchtesgaden, was accelerated. A party prepared to leave early the next day. Admiral von Puttkammer, Hitler's naval aide, had been given the task of destroying all Hitler's public papers at the Berghof. Julius Schaub, Hitler's personal adjutant, who had dealt with all the papers in the Reich Chancellery and bunker, was to destroy all his private correspondence. Two of the four secretaries had already been sent southwards. Dr Morell, who was apparently trembling with fear, managed to attach himself to the party. He took with him a German Army footlocker full of Hitler's medical records.

Allied intelligence services heard far more extravagant rumours of escape from Berlin. The State Department in Washington, DC, was warned by its embassy in Madrid that 'the chiefs plan to get to Japan by way of Norway. Heinkel 177s will take them to Norway, and there, already waiting, are planes - probably Vikings - for the non-stop flight to Japan.' This was no doubt the wishful thinking of Nazis in Spain, who also talked of U-boats being provisioned to take food to Germany and perhaps to bring out Nazi leaders. 'There exist in Switzerland several hospitals where, under cover of wounds or illness, Germans are hospitalized. In reality these are important personalities to be saved.' The claim that 'camouflaged German planes continue to bring in notables [to Spain]' was, however, much closer to the truth. Pierre Laval, the former prime minister of Vichy France, was among those flown out of Germany to Barcelona in unmarked Junkers transports. Franco felt obliged to return Laval to France, but a number of Nazis obtained sanctuary.

The exodus meant that rooms in the bunker and Reich Chancellery were liberated. Major Freytag von Loringhoven, who had moved into the bunker with General Krebs, found that the ventilation system worked well. But in the tiny conference room, with fifteen to twenty people in there, the air became almost unbreathable. Hitler was the only one to sit. The others were almost asleep on their feet. The bombing and shelling began to create cracks in the walls, and dust seeped out into the air. Since smoking was strictly forbidden in the lower Führer bunker, those desperate for a cigarette had to creep up a floor to the upper bunker. Despite these inconveniences, the bunker and the Reich Chancellery cellars were 'superbly stocked' with food and alcohol. The generous supplies of drink did not contribute to clear thinking. 'In the bunker,' Colonel de Maizière noted, 'an atmosphere of disintegration reigned. One saw drunkenness and dejection, yet also men of all ranks acting in a frantic manner. Discipline had ceased to exist.' This dissipation appeared to provide a striking contrast with the Nazi notion of family values when Frau Goebbels arrived, leading her six children.

And yet both contained exactly the same currents of sentimentality, self-pity and brutality.

Freytag von Loringhoven was at the bottom of the stairs when he suddenly saw Magda Goebbels descend the concrete stairs, followed by her six children. She looked ''
sehr damenhaft
' — 'very ladylike'. The six children behind ranged from twelve years old down to five: Helga, Hilde, Helmut, Holde, Hedda and Heide. Their first names, all beginning with the same letter, had not been chosen like a class of warships, but to honour the place in the alphabet marked by the Führer's name. They descended the stairs like a school crocodile. Their pale faces stood out against their dark coats. Helga, the oldest, looked very sad, but she did not cry. Hitler knew and approved of the decision by Joseph and Magda Goebbels to kill their children before they killed themselves. This proof of total loyalty prompted him to present her with his own gold Nazi Party badge, which he always wore on his tunic. The arrival of the children in the bunker had a momentarily sobering effect. Everyone who saw them enter knew that they would be murdered by their parents as part of a Führerdämmerung.

After his terrible emotional storm in the early afternoon, Hitler rested in his small bunker sitting room with Eva Braun. He summoned his two remaining secretaries, Gerda Christian and Traudl Junge, his Austrian dietician, Constanze Manzialy, and Bormann's secretary, Elsa Krüger. Hitler told the women that they must prepare to leave for the Berghof like the others. Eva Braun smiled and went to him. 'You know that I am never going to leave you,' she said. 'I will stay by your side.' He pulled her head down to him and, in front of everybody, kissed her full on the lips. This act astonished all who knew him. Traudl Junge and Gerda Christian said that they would stay too. Hitler looked at them fondly. 'If only my generals had been as brave as you,' he said. He dispensed cyanide pills to them as a farewell present.

It was presumably soon after this that Eva Braun went to type a last letter to her best friend, Herta Ostermayr. This was to accompany all her jewels. One of the men about to fly south was waiting to take the package for her. She told Herta in the letter that the jewels were to be distributed according to her will. Their value would help friends and family keep their heads 'above water' in the days to come. 'Forgive me if this is a bit confused,' she wrote, 'but I am surrounded by the six children of G[oebbels] and they are not being quiet. What should I say to you? I cannot understand how it should have all come to this, but it is impossible to believe any more in a God.'

19
The Bombarded City

On 23 April, the Nazi-controlled radio station in Prague claimed that the Führer's decision to stay in the capital of the Reich gave 'the battle a European significance'. The same morning, the headline of the newspaper of the 3rd Shock Army read, 'Motherland Rejoice! We are on the streets of Berlin!' National Socialism had laid claim to an international cause, while international Communism had become unashamedly patriotic.

For the civilians of Berlin, ideological causes made little difference any more. Survival was what counted under the bombardment. Worse was to come. General Kazakov was bringing in 600mm siege guns on specially widened tracks along the line leading to the Schlesicher Bahnhof in the east of the city. Each shell weighed half a ton.

Apart from the three flak towers, one of the largest refuges in Berlin was the Anhalter Bahnhof bunker, next to the main station. Built in ferro-concrete, with three storeys above ground and two below, its walls were up to four and a half metres thick. Pine seats and tables had been provided by the authorities, as well as emergency supplies of tinned sardines, but neither lasted long when both fuel and food were in such short supply. The Anhalter bunker's great advantage was its direct link to the U-Bahn tunnels, even though the trains were not running. People could walk the five kilometres to the Nordbahnhof, without ever being exposed.

The conditions in the bunker became appalling, with up to 12,000 people crammed into 3,600 square metres. The crush was so great that nobody could have reached the lavatory even if it had been open. One woman described how she spent six days on the same step. For hygienic Germans, it was a great ordeal, but with water supplies cut, drinking water was a far higher priority. There was a pump which still worked outside the station, and young women near the entrance took the risk of running with a pail to fetch water. Many were killed, because the station was a prime target for Soviet artillery. But those who made it back alive earned eternal gratitude from those too weak to fetch it for themselves, or they bartered sips for food from those who lacked the courage to run the gauntlet themselves.

At the anti-tank barriers set up at major intersections, the Feldgendarmerie checked papers, ready to arrest and execute any deserters. In cellars, a growing trickle of German officers and soldiers began to appear in civilian clothes. 'Desertion suddenly seems quite natural, almost creditable,' a woman diarist noted on that morning of Monday 23 April. She thought of Leonidas's 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, about whom they had heard so much at school. 'Maybe here and there 300 German soldiers would behave in the same way: 3 million would not. The greater the crowd, the less the chance for schoolbook heroism. By nature, we women don't appreciate it much either. We're sensible, practical, opportunistic. We prefer men alive.'

When she went in search of coal later that morning along the S-Bahn tracks, she found that the tunnel to the south was already blocked against the Russians on the southern rim of the city. She heard from bystanders that a man accused of desertion had been hanged at the other end of the tunnel. Apparently he had been hanged with his feet not very far off the ground and some boys had been amusing themselves by twisting the corpse round and making it spin back.

On her way home she was horrified by the sight of'soft-faced children under huge steel helmets ... so tiny and thin in uniforms far too large for them'. She wondered why she was so outraged by 'this abuse of children', when if they had been just a few years older, she would have been far less upset. She concluded that some rule of nature, which protected the survival of the species, was being broken by throwing immature humans into battle. To take that step was 'a symptom of madness'.

Perhaps as a side-effect of this law linking death with sexual maturity, the arrival of the enemy at the edge of the city made young soldiers desperate to lose their virginity. Girls, well aware of the high risk of rape, preferred to give themselves to almost any German boy first than to a drunken and probably violent Soviet soldier. In the broadcasting centre of the Grossdeutscher Rundfunk on the Masurenallee, two-thirds of the 500-strong staff were young women - many little more than eighteen. There, in the last week of April, a 'real feeling of disintegration' spread, with heavy drinking and indiscriminate copulation amid the stacks of the sound archive. There was also a good deal of sexual activity between people of various ages in unlit cellars and bunkers. The aphrodisiac effect of mortal danger is hardly an unknown historical phenomenon.

A Norwegian journalist, describing the atmosphere in the city, claimed that boys and girls in uniform simply gave in 'to their impulses' in 'a hectic search for pleasure'. But this showed a lack of understanding, especially for the girls facing the prospect of rape. In any case, apart from those coupling round the Zoo bunker and in the Tiergarten's rhododendron bushes, which were just coming into flower amid the wreckage, many others simply cuddled each other in a desperate need for reassurance.

The other instinct of the moment was to hoard like a squirrel. Gerda Petersohn, a nineteen-year-old secretary with Lufthansa, was at home in Neukölln, not far from an S-Bahn station, when word spread in the neighbourhood that a Luftwaffe rations wagon was stranded on the track. Women rushed down to loot it. They plunged into boxes and crates to grab at anything. Gerda saw a woman nearby with her arms full of lavatory paper just as Russian planes attacked, strafing with machine-gun fire and dropping small bombs. Gerda rolled under a wagon. The woman with lavatory paper in her arms was killed. 'What a thing to die for,' Gerda thought. The last thing she grabbed before running back to their apartment building was a packet of pilot's emergency rations, containing Schoka-Cola and small malt tablets. These tablets were to prove very useful in an unexpected way.

There has been a dramatic account of the looting of the Karstadt department store in the Hermannplatz, where queuing shoppers had been blown to pieces during the first artillery bombardment on 21 April. According to this story, SS troops allowed civilians to take what they wanted before they blew the place up. The explosion was said to have killed many over-eager looters. But in fact when the SS
Nordland
Division took over the store several days later, they did not want to blow it up. They needed Karstadt's twin towers as observation posts to watch the Soviet advance on Neukölln and the Tempelhof aerodrome.

Once the electricity supply failed and wirelesses ceased working, the rumour mill became the only news available. More false stories than true ran around Berlin. One claimed that Field Marshal Model had not committed suicide, he had been secretly arrested by the Gestapo. The regime's own smokescreen of lies made almost anything believable, however inaccurate.

The 7th Department of the 1st Belorussian Front launched a propaganda blitz on Berlin with air-dropped leaflets telling German soldiers that it was 'hopeless to fight on'. A Soviet prison was the only way to save their lives, which were not worth losing for the fascist government. Others were 'safe-conduct passes' to be shown to Red Army soldiers when surrendering. The department claimed success because 'almost 50 per cent of Germans who surrendered in Berlin' had one of the leaflets and showed it to their Soviet captors. Altogether ninety-five different leaflets, almost 50 million copies in all, were dropped. Others - around 1.66 million — were distributed by German civilians and soldiers who were sent back across the lines. During the Berlin operation 2,365 civilians were sent back to infiltrate the city. Also 2,130 German prisoners of war were sent back, of whom 1,845 returned bringing a further 8,340 prisoners. This tactic was deemed to be such a success that the commander of the 3rd Shock Army ordered the mass release of German prisoners of war under the supervision of political officers. Indoctrinated former prisoners of war - '
Seydlitz-truppen
' as the German authorities termed them - were sent through the lines to Berlin with letters written to families by recently captured prisoners. Corporal Max S., for example, wrote to his parents, 'My beloved relatives. Yesterday I became a prisoner of the Russians. We had been told that Russians shoot their prisoners, but this isn't true. The Russians are treating their prisoners very well. They fed me, and warmed me up. I am feeling well. The war will end soon and I'll see you again soon, my dear ones. Don't worry about me. I am alive and healthy.' The phrasing and formulae in the letter suggest that it was dictated by a Russian officer, but even so the word-of-mouth effect of such missives was worth far more than tens of thousands of leaflets.

One leaflet dropped over the capital itself was addressed to the women of Berlin. 'Because the fascist clique is afraid of punishment, it is hoping to prolong the war. But you women have nothing to be afraid of. No one will touch you.' It then urged them to persuade German officers and soldiers to capitulate. Since the political officers must have known the trail of mass violation in the wake of the advance through German territory, this was a breathtaking reassurance, even by most standards of wartime propaganda. Soviet propagandists also organized radio broadcasts by 'women, actors, priests and professors' to reassure their listeners that they would not be harmed in any way.

A more effective message came in a 'letter from the inhabitants of Friedrichshafen to the Berlin Garrison'. 'The day after the arrival of the Red Army life returned to normal,' it read. 'Food supplies recommenced. The inhabitants of Friedrichshafen tell you not to believe the false propaganda of Goebbels about the Red Army.' The fear of starvation, above all the starvation of children, seems to have represented a greater fear for many women than the danger of rape.

Field Marshal Keitel, who had left the Führer bunker the evening before with the sandwiches, chocolate and cognac provided by a solicitous Hitler, had driven south-westwards from the capital. He was fortunate not to encounter any of Lelyushenko's tanks. Keitel headed first to the headquarters of XX Corps at Wiesenburg, only thirty kilometres short of the American bridgehead at Zerbst. General Köhler's corps consisted mainly of so-called 'Young' divisions, largely those called up for pre-military training in the Reich Labour Service. They were far from fully trained, but they certainly did not lack spirit, as General Wenck had soon found.

In the early hours of 23 April, Keitel moved to the nearby headquarters of the Twelfth Army in a forestry station. He was met by General Wenck and his chief of staff, Colonel Reichhelm. There could not have been a greater contrast between the field marshal and the general. Keitel was pompous, vain, stupid, brutal and obsequious to his Führer. Wenck, who looked young, despite his silver hair, was extremely intelligent and greatly liked by both colleagues and his soldiers. Colonel Reichhelm, his chief of staff", said of their visitor that he was 'an outstanding sergeant, but no field marshal'. This was a mild criticism. Keitel, of all the generals who sided unconditionally with Hitler, was hated as the chief 'gravedigger of the army'.

Keitel began lecturing Wenck and Reichhelm on the need for the Twelfth Army to save the Führer in Berlin. He ranted as if addressing a Nazi Party rally and waved his field marshal's baton. 'We let him talk and we let him leave,' Reichhelm said later. But Wenck already had another idea. He would indeed attack towards Berlin, as ordered, but not to save Hitler. He wanted to force open a corridor from the Elbe, to allow soldiers and civilians to escape both the senseless fighting and the Red Army. It was to be a
Rettungsaktion
- a rescue operation. Hitler, not trusting any general, insisted that his Führer order to the Twelfth Army should be broadcast over the radio addressed to the '
Soldaten der Armee Wenck!
' It was probably the only time in history that military orders were deliberately made public in the middle of a battle. This was immediately followed by the
Werwolfsender
radio station, which announced that 'the Fiihrer has issued orders from Berlin that units fighting [the] Americans rapidly be transferred east to defend Berlin. Sixteen divisions [are] already moving and can be expected [to] arrive [in] Berlin [at] any hour'. The whole purpose was to deceive the population of Berlin into believing that the Americans were now supporting the Germans against the Red Army. By chance, that day American air activity over the central Elbe suddenly halted. It was a huge relief for Twelfth Army soldiers.

Wenck and his staff knew that Keitel was as much of a fantasist as Hitler. Any suggestion of tackling two Soviet tank armies when they lacked battle-worthy tanks was grotesque. 'So we made up our own orders,' said Colonel Humboldt, the chief operations officer. Wenck planned to drive on Potsdam with one force while the bulk of the army would advance eastwards, south of Berlin, to join up with Busse and help his Ninth Army escape. 'We were in radio contact with Busse and knew where he was.' Only a light screen of troops would be left facing the Americans.

Detailed orders were issued rapidly, and later that day, General Wenck drove in a Kübelwagen to address the young soldiers, both those who were to attack north-eastwards towards Potsdam and those who were to attack towards Treuenbrietzen and Beelitz, where the hospital complex was threatened. 'Boys, you've got to go in once more,' Wenck told them. 'It's not about Berlin any more, it's not about the Reich any more.' Their task was to save people from the fighting and the Russians. Hans-Dietrich Genscher, a young sapper with the Twelfth Army, described their emotions as 'a feeling of loyalty, a sense of responsibility and comradeship'.

Wenck's leadership struck a powerful chord, even if reactions varied between those who believed in a humanitarian operation and those keener to take on the Russians instead of the Western Allies. 'So about turn!' wrote Peter Rettich, the battalion commander of the
Scharnhorst
Division, which had taken such a hammering from the Americans. 'And now it's quick march to the east against the Ivans.'

The other key German general in the battle for Berlin to emerge at this time was General Helmuth Weidling, the commander of the LVI Panzer Corps. Weidling looked rather like a professorial version of Erich von Stroheim, only with hair.