The Fall of Berlin 1945 (45 page)

Finally back in her own room, she piled all the furniture against the door and retired to bed. As was probably the case for all women in Berlin who were raped at this time, she found the lack of running water in which to wash herself afterwards made things far worse. She had hardly been in bed for long when her barricade was pushed aside. A group of soldiers came in and started eating and drinking in her kitchen. A giant named Petka picked her up when she tried to slip out of the apartment. She begged him not to allowr the others to rape her as well and he agreed. Early the next morning, he woke up when the company rooster crowed down in the street. He announced that he must go back on duty, then nearly crushed her fingers in a goodbye handshake, assuring her that he would be back at 7 that evening.

Many other women also 'conceded' to one soldier in the hope of protecting themselves from gang rape. Magda Wieland, a twenty-four-year-old actress, found the arrival of Russian troops in Giesebrechtstrasse, just off the Kürfurstendamm, 'the most frightening moment of the whole war'. She hid in a huge, ornately carved mahogany cupboard when they burst in. A very young soldier from Central Asia hauled her out. He was so excited at the prospect of a beautiful young blonde that he suffered from premature ejaculation. By sign language, she offered herself to him as a girlfriend if he would protect her from other Russian soldiers. He was clearly thrilled at the idea of having a blonde girlfriend, and went out to boast to his friends, but another soldier arrived and raped her brutally.

In the cellar, Ellen Goetz, a Jewish friend of Magda's who had sought shelter there when she escaped from the Lehrterstrasse prison after a heavy bombardment, was also dragged out and raped. When other Germans tried to explain to the Russians that she was Jewish and had been persecuted, they received the terse retort, '
Frau ist Frau.
' Russian officers arrived later. They themselves behaved very correctly, but they did nothing to control their men.

Giesebrechtstrasse housed a very mixed section of Berlin life. Hans Gensecke, a well-known journalist, who had been punished for hiding Jews by being made to remove corpses from bombed cellars, also lived at No. 10. So too, on the third floor of the same block, did Kaltenbrunner's mistress, who entertained him in her apartment decorated with gilded doors and silk upholstered furniture and tapestries, no doubt looted from occupied areas of Europe. Next door, No. 11, had been infamous for the presence of 'Salon Kitty', the Nazi brothel for
Prominenten
. This establishment, with sixteen young prostitutes, had been taken over earlier in the war by Heydrich and Schellenberg. It was run by the intelligence department of the SS to spy on senior officials, Wehrmacht officers and foreign ambassadors and then blackmail them.

All the rooms were bugged, and soon after the capture of Berlin, the NKVD apparently examined the technology used with great interest. Next door, on the far side, Colonel General Paul von Hase, the city commandant of Berlin, had lived until his arrest and execution following the July plot.

With Hitler Youth and SS opening fire at any house which displayed a white flag, civilians found themselves crushed by the violent intransigence of both sides. The smell of decomposing corpses spread from the piles of rubble which had been buildings, and the smell of charred flesh from the blackened skeletons of burnt-out houses. But it was not these terrible scenes as much as three years of propaganda which shaped the attitude of Soviet troops. They saw Berlin as 'this grey, frightening, gloomy, misanthropic city, this bandit capital'.

Even German Communists were not spared. In Wedding, a left-wing stronghold until 1933, activists from the Jülicherstrasse went out to congratulate the Soviet officers commanding the unit to occupy their district, showing their Party cards, which they had kept hidden during twelve years of illegality. They volunteered their wives and daughters to help out with washing and cooking, but, according to a French prisoner of war, the unit's officers raped them 'that very evening'.

While the occupants of the Führer bunker were preoccupied with the T-34s and Stalin tanks advancing from the Potsdamerplatz and up the Wilhelmstrasse, Soviet eyes were fixed on the northern side of central Berlin. The 3rd Shock Army angled its advance through Moabit, just north-east of the Spree, to line itself up for an attack on the Reichstag.

The commander of the 150th Rifle Division, General Shatilov, thought that Goebbels himself was directing the defence of Moabit prison and that they might capture him alive. He described Moabit prison 'looking at us maliciously with its narrow windows'. (It is striking how Russians saw evil in the very buildings of Berlin, just as they had in German trees on crossing the frontier.) Moabit prison did not appear an easy task to storm. The artillery brought forward a heavy gun, but it attracted frantic firing from within the prison. The very first gun-layer was killed and so was the second, but a breach was soon blasted in the walls.

Storm groups dashed across the street and entered the courtyard. Once they were inside, the German garrison surrendered very quickly. The sappers, who had found mines near the entrance, went running in to check for explosives. Their commander remembered the heavy metallic echo as they ran up the iron stairways. Every German who came out with raised arms was closely examined, even those in private's uniform, in case they were Goebbels in disguise. Cell doors were thrown open, and the liberated prisoners came out squinting in the sunlight.

Other objectives cost far heavier casualties in a city where the streets drifted with smoke from indiscriminate shellfire. 'What a terrible price we are paying for each step to victory,' observed the editor of the military newspaper
Voin Rodiny
on a visit to the fighting in Berlin. He was killed almost seconds later by a shell explosion. Deaths so close to the end of such a long and ferocious war seemed doubly poignant. Many were moved by the death of Mikhail Shmonin, a young and greatly admired platoon commander. 'Follow me!' he had cried to his sergeant, running towards a building. He had hardly fired three shots when a heavy shell, almost certainly a Soviet one, struck the wall in front of him. The side of the house collapsed and the lieutenant, with 'pink cheeks, clear complexion and large clear eyes', was buried under the rubble.

Even if the Red Army had 'soon learned what to expect' in street and house-fighting in Berlin, with 'fausters near barricades' and 'stone and concrete buildings turned into bunkers', it began to rely more and more on the 152mm and 203mm heavy howitzers fired at short range over open sights. Only then would the assault teams go in. But the one battleground that Soviet troops avoided if at all possible was subway tunnels and bunkers, of which there were over 1,000 in the greater Berlin area. They were extremely cautious about entering civilian air-raid shelters, convinced that German soldiers were hiding ready to ambush them, or emerge to attack them in the rear. As a result, they virtually sealed off any shelters they overran. Civilians who came to the surface were likely to be shot. There are stories, mainly the product of German paranoia, that T-34s were driven into railway tunnels to emerge behind their lines. The only genuine case of an underground tank, however, appears to be that of an unfortunate T-34 driver who failed to spot the entrance of the Alexanderplatz U-Bahn station and charged down the stairs. Stories of light artillery bumped down station stairs, step by step, and manhandled on to the tracks also owe more to folklore than to fact.

From the Moabit prison, it was only 800 metres down Alt Moabit to the Moltke bridge over the Spree. Another 600 metres beyond that stood the Reichstag, which from time to time became visible when the smoke cleared. For the 150th and the 171st Rifle Divisions, it seemed so close now, and yet they had no illusions about the dangers ahead.

They knew that many of them would die before they could raise their red banners over the building chosen by Stalin as the symbol of Berlin.

Their commanders, to please Comrade Stalin, wanted the building captured in time for it to be announced at the May Day celebrations in Moscow.

The advance down to the Moltke bridge began on the afternoon of 28 April. The lead battalions from the two divisions left from the same start-line, further emphasizing the race. The bridge ahead was barricaded on both sides. It was mined and protected with barbed wire and covered by machine-gun and artillery fire from both flanks. Shortly before 6 p.m., there was a deafening detonation as the Germans blew the Moltke bridge. When the smoke and dust settled, it became clear that the demolition had not been entirely successful. The bridge sagged, but was certainly passable by infantry.

Captain Neustroev, the battalion commander, ordered Sergeant Pyat- nitsky to take his platoon across in a probing attack. Pyatnitsky and his men dashed over the open space which led to the bridge and managed to shelter behind the Germans' own barricade. Neustroev then called in artillery support for the crossing. It seems to have taken rather a long time for the artillery observation officers to turn up and organize their batteries, but just as the last light was fading, artillery preparation began. The heavy bombardment at close range smashed the German fire-positions, and the leading infantry platoons dashed across to fight their way into the large buildings on the Kronprinzufer and Moltkestrasse. By midnight, just as Hitler was marrying Eva Braun, they established a firm bridgehead. During the rest of the night, the bulk of the 150th and 171st Rifle Divisions crossed the Spree.

The 150th Rifle Division stormed the Ministry of the Interior, on the southern side of the Moltkestrasse. This massive building immediately became known as 'Himmler's House'. With doors and windows blocked to provide embrasures for the defenders, it proved a hard fortress to storm. Unable to bring forward gun and rocket batteries, sappers improvised individual katyusha launchers on lengths of railway line. But the basic tools of this close-quarter fighting through the morning of 29 April were grenades and sub-machine guns.

Soviet soldiers, even if afraid of dying in the last days of the battle, also wanted to impress everyone at home. As conquerors of Berlin, they saw themselves as an elite in the post-war Soviet Union. 'Greetings from the front,' wrote Vladimir Borisovich Pereverzev that day. 'Hello, my nearest and dearest ones. So far I am alive and healthy, only I am slightly drunk the whole time. But this is necessary to keep up your courage. A reasonable ration of three-star cognac will do no harm.

Naturally we ourselves punish those who don't know their capacity [for drink]. Now we're tightening the circle round the centre of the city. I am just 500 metres from the Reichstag. We have already crossed the Spree and within a few days the Fritzes and the Hanses will be kaputt.

They are still writing on the walls that "
Berlin bleibt deutsch
", but we say instead, "
Alles deutsch kaputt.
" And it will turn out the way we say it. I wanted to send you my photo, which was taken, but we have not had a chance to develop it. It's a pity because the photo would be very interesting: a sub-machine gun on my shoulder, a Mauser stuck into my belt, grenades at my side. There's a lot to hit Germans with. To cut a long story short we'll be in the Reichstag tomorrow. I can't send parcels [i.e. looted goods]. There's no time for it. And we front units have other things to do. You write that part of the kitchen ceiling collapsed, but that's nothing! A six-storey building collapsed on us and we had to dig our boys out. This is how we live and beat the Germans. This briefly is my news.' Pereverzev was badly wounded shortly after finishing the letter. He died on the day that victory was announced.

'Sunday 29 April,' wrote Martin Bormann in his diary. 'The second day which has started with a hurricane of fire. During the night of 28-29 April, the foreign press wrote about Himmler's offer of capitulation.

The wedding of Hitler and Eva Braun. Führer dictates his political and private wills. Traitors Jodl, Himmler and the generals abandon us to the Bolsheviks. Hurricane fire again. According to the information of the enemy, the Americans have broken into Munich.'

Hitler, even though his optimism and pessimism had been surging back and forth, finally realized that all was lost. His secure radio-telephone communications had collapsed, literally, when the last balloon raising the aerial above the Führer bunker was shot down. As a result Red Army listening stations intercepted its ordinary signals traffic that day. Bormann and Krebs jointly signed a message to all commanders:

'Führer expects an unshakeable loyalty from Schörner, Wenck and others. He also expects Schörner and Wenck to save him and Berlin.' Field Marshal Schörner replied that 'the rear areas are completely disorganized. The civilian population makes it difficult to operate.'

Finally, Wenck made it clear that no miracles should be expected from the Twelfth Army: 'The troops of the Army suffered great losses and there is a severe shortage of weapons.'

Those in the Führer bunker, even the loyalists, finally saw that the longer Hitler delayed his suicide the greater the number of people who would die. After the Himmler and Göring debacles, nobody could consider a cease-fire until the Führer had killed himself. The problem was that if he waited until the Russians were at the Reich Chancellery door, then none of them would get out alive.

Freytag von Loringhoven did not want to die in such surroundings, or in such company. After the three messengers left, bearing copies of Hitler's last testament, the idea occurred to him that, with communications down, he and Boldt could ask for permission to join up with troops outside the city. 'Herr General,' he said to General Krebs. 'I do not want to die like a rat here, I would like to return to the fighting troops.' Krebs was at first reluctant. Then he spoke to General Burgdorf. Burgdorf said that any of the remaining military aides should be allowed to leave. His assistant, Lieutenant Colonel Weiss, should go with Freytag von Loringhoven and Captain Boldt.

Hitler was approached for his approval after the midday situation conference. 'How are you going to get out of Berlin?' he asked. Freytag von Loringhoven explained their route, out of the Reich Chancellery cellars and across Berlin to the Havel, where they would find a boat. Hitler became enthused. 'You must get an electric motor boat, because that doesn't make any noise and you can get through the Russian lines.'