The Fall of Berlin 1945 (9 page)

Whether or not German refugees from Breslau went down with the steamers sunk by Lelyushenko's tanks, the fate of women and children who had left the city on foot during the panic-stricken evacuation was terrible. All husbands not already serving in the Wehrmacht were called up for the Volkssturm to defend the city. Wives were therefore left to fend for themselves entirely. All they heard were the loudspeaker vans telling civilians to flee the city. Although frightened, the mothers who did not manage to obtain places on the overcrowded trains took the normal precautions to look after infant children, such as filling a thermos with hot milk and bundling them up as warmly as possible. They took rucksacks containing powdered milk and food for themselves. In any case, they expected after the announcements that the Nazi Party social welfare organization, the NSV, would have prepared some form of help along the way.

Outside Breslau, however, the women found that they were on their own. Very few motor vehicles were leaving the city, so only a lucky few received lifts. The snow was deep on the roads and eventually most women had to abandon their prams and carry the youngest children. In the icy wind they also found that their thermoses had cooled. There was only one way to feed a hungry infant, but they could not find any shelter in which to breast-feed. All the houses were locked, either abandoned already or owned by people who refused to open their door to anyone. In despair, some mothers offered their baby a breast in the lea of a shed or some other windbreak, but it was no good. The child would not feed and the mother's body temperature dropped dangerously. Some even suffered a frostbitten breast. One young wife, in a letter to her mother explaining the death from cold of her own child, also described the fate of other mothers, some crying over a bundle which contained a baby frozen to death, others sitting in the snow, propped against a tree by the side of the road, with older children standing nearby whimpering in fear, not knowing whether their mother was unconscious or dead. In that cold it made little difference.

Zhukov's 1st Belorussian Front, meanwhile, had been progressing even more rapidly in its drive to the north-west. He told his two tank armies to avoid areas of resistance and to advance between seventy and 100 kilometres a day. Yet on 25 January, Stalin rang Zhukov in the afternoon to tell him to rein in. 'When you reach the Oder,' he said, 'you'll be more than 150 kilometres from the flank of the 2nd Belorussian Front.

You can't do this now. You must wait until [Rokossovsky] finishes operations in East Prussia and deploys across the Vistula.' Stalin was concerned about a German counter-attack on Zhukov's right flank from German troops along the Pomeranian coastline, what became known as the 'Baltic balcony'. Zhukov begged Stalin to let him continue. If he waited another ten days for Rokossovsky to finish in East Prussia, that would give the Germans time to man the Meseritz fortified line. Stalin agreed with great reluctance.

Zhukov's armies were crossing the region the Nazis had called the Wartheland, the area of western Poland which they had seized after their invasion in 1939. Its Gauleiter, Arthur Greiser, was an unspeakable racist even by Nazi standards. His Warthegau province had been the scene of the most brutal evictions imaginable. Over 700,000 Poles lost everything, their possessions as well as their homes, which were handed over to Volksdeutsch settlers brought in from all over central and south-eastern Europe. The dispossessed Poles had been dumped in the General Gouvernement without shelter, food or hope of work. The treatment of Jews had been even worse. Over 160,000 had been forced into the tiny ghetto in Lodz. Those who did not die of starvation ended up in concentration camps. Just 850 remained alive when the Soviet tanks entered the city.

The Polish desire for revenge was so fierce that Serov, the chief of NKVD of the 1st Belorussian Front, complained to Beria that it interfered with intelligence-gathering. 'Troops of the 1st Polish Army treat Germans especially severely,' he wrote. 'Often captured German officers and soldiers do not reach the prisoner assembly areas. They are shot en route. For example, on the sector of the and Infantry Regiment of the 1st Infantry Division, eighty Germans were captured. Just two prisoners reached the assembly area. All the others had been executed. The two survivors were questioned by the regimental commander, but when he sent them to be interrogated by his intelligence officer, the pair were shot on the way.'

Zhukov's decision to force forward with his two tank armies paid off. The Germans never had a chance to organize a line of defence. On the right, the 3rd Shock Army, the 47th, the 61st and the 1st Polish Armies advanced parallel to the Vistula and headed between Bromberg and Schneidemühl to protect the exposed flank. In the middle, Bogdanov's 2nd Guards Tank Army pushed on, followed by Berzarin's 5th Shock Army. And on the left Katukov's 1st Guards Tank Army charged ahead to Poznan. But Poznan was not like Lodz. On reaching Poznan on 25 January, Katukov saw that it could not be captured off the march, and pushed straight on as Zhukov had instructed. Poznan was left to Chuikov, following closely with the 8th Guards Army, to sort out. He was not pleased, and it seems only to have increased his dislike for Zhukov.

Gauleiter Greiser, like Koch in East Prussia, had fled his capital, having ordered everyone else to hold fast. He had refused to allow the evacuation of any civilians until 20 January, and as a result it seems that in many areas more than half of the population failed to get away. Vasily Grossman, who had attached himself again to Chuikov's 8th Guards Army, became increasingly conscious of 'the German civilian, secretly watching us from behind curtains'.

There was plenty to watch outside. 'The infantry is moving in a whole variety of horse-drawn vehicles,' Grossman jotted in his notebook. 'The boys are smoking
makhorka
, eating and drinking, and playing cards. A convoy of carts decorated with carpets passes by. The drivers are sitting on feather mattresses. Soldiers no longer eat military rations.

They eat pork, turkey and chicken. Rosy and well-fed faces are to be seen for the first time.' 'German civilians, already overtaken by our leading tank detachments, have turned round and are now moving back. They receive a good beating and their horses are stolen from them by Poles who take every opportunity to rob them.' Grossman, like most Soviet citizens, had little idea of what had really happened in 1939 and 1940, and therefore of the reasons why Poles hated the Germans as much as they did. Stalin's secret treaty with Hitler, dividing the country between them, had been veiled by a news blackout in the Soviet Union. Grossman did not hide unpalatable truths from himself, however, even if he could never publish them. 'There were 250 of our girls whom the Germans had brought from the oblasts of Voroshilovgrad, Kharkov and Kiev. The chief of the army political department said that these girls had been left almost without clothes. They were covered in lice and their bellies swollen from hunger. But a man from the army newspaper told me that these girls had been quite neat and well dressed, until our soldiers arrived and took everything from them.'

Grossman soon discovered how much the Red Army men took. 'Liberated Soviet girls quite often complain that our soldiers rape them,' he noted. 'One girl said to me in tears, "He was an old man, older than my father."' But Grossman refused to believe the worst of the true
frontoviki
. 'Frontline soldiers are advancing day and night under fire, with pure and saintly hearts. The rear echelon men who follow along behind are raping, drinking and looting.'

The street battles in Poznan provided a foretaste of what lay ahead in Berlin. Grossman, who had spent so much time in Stalingrad during the battle, was interested to see what Chuikov, who had coined the phrase the 'Stalingrad Academy of street-fighting', was going to do. 'The main principle in Stalingrad,' Grossman observed, 'was that we upset the balance between the power of machinery and the vulnerability of infantry. But now Academician Chuikov is forced by circumstances into the same sort of situation as at Stalingrad, only with roles reversed. He is attacking the Germans violently in the streets of Poznan, using huge mechanical power and little infantry.'

He spent some time with Chuikov during the battle for Poznan. 'Chuikov is sitting in a cold, brightly lit room on the second floor of a requisitioned villa. The telephone rings constantly. Unit commanders are reporting on the street fighting in Poznan.' Between calls, Chuikov was boasting how he had 'smashed the German defences round Warsaw'. 'Chuikov listens to the telephone, reaches for the map, and says, "Sorry, I've just got to put my glasses on."' The reading glasses looked strange on his tough face. 'He reads the report, chuckles and taps his adjutant on the nose with a pencil.' (When angry with an officer, Chuikov more often used his fist, and it was not a tap, according to one of his staff.) 'He then shouts into the telephone, "If they try to break through to the west, let them out into the open and we'll squash them like bugs. Now it's death to the Germans. They won't escape."

'It really is amazing,' Chuikov remarked sarcastically in one of his gibes against Zhukov, 'when you consider our battle experience and our wonderful intelligence, that we failed to notice one little detail. We didn't know that there's a first-class fortress at Poznan. One of the strongest in Europe. We thought it was just a town which we could take off the march, and now we're really in for it.'

While Chuikov remained behind to deal with the fortress of Poznan, the rest of his army and the 1st Guards Tank Army pushed forward to the Meseritz line east of the Oder. Their main problem was not German resistance but their supply lines. Railroads had been smashed by the retreating Germans, but also Poland had a different gauge of track from the Soviet Union. As a result, the movement of supplies depended on trucks, mostly American Studebakers. Significantly, there has been little acknowledgement by Russian historians that if it had not been for American Lend-Lease trucks, the Red Army's advance would have taken far longer and the Western Allies might well have reached Berlin first.

Almost every Soviet soldier remembered vividly the moment of crossing the pre-1939 frontier into Germany. 'We marched out of a forest,' Senior Lieutenant Klochkov with the 3rd Shock Army recalled, 'and we saw a board nailed to a post. On it was written, "Here it is - the accursed Germany." We were entering the territory of Hitler's Reich. Soldiers began looking around curiously. German villages are in many ways different from Polish villages. Most houses are built from brick and stone. They have tidily trimmed fruit trees in their little gardens. The roads are good.' Klochkov, like so many of his fellow countrymen, could not understand why Germans, 'who were not thoughtless people', should have risked prosperous and comfortable lives to invade the Soviet Union.

Further along the road to the Reich capital, Vasily Grossman accompanied part of the 8th Guards Army sent on ahead from Poznan. Its political department had erected placards by the side of the road on which was written, 'Tremble with fear, fascist Germany, the day of reckoning has come!'

Grossman was with them when they sacked the town of Schwerin. He jotted down in pencil in a small notebook whatever he saw: 'Everything is on fire . . . An old woman jumps from a window in a burning building .. . Looting is going on ... It's light during the night because everything is ablaze ... At the [town] commandant's office, a German woman dressed in black and with dead lips, is speaking in a weak, whispering voice. There is a girl with her who has black bruises on her neck and face, a swollen eye and terrible bruises on her hands. The girl was raped by a soldier from the headquarters signals company. He is also present. He has a full, red face and looks sleepy. The commandant is questioning them all together.'

Grossman noted the 'horror in the eyes of women and girls . . . Terrible things are happening to German women. A cultivated German man explains with expressive gestures and broken Russian words that his wife has been raped by ten men that day . . . Soviet girls who have been liberated from camps are suffering greatly too. Last night some of them hid in the room provided for the war correspondents. Screams wake us up in the night. One of the correspondents could not restrain himself. An animated discussion takes place, and order is restored.' Grossman then noted what he had evidently heard about a young mother. She was being raped continuously in a farm shed. Her relatives came to the shed and asked the soldiers to allow her a break to breast-feed the baby because it would not stop crying. All this was taking place next to a headquarters and in the full sight of officers supposedly responsible for discipline.

On Tuesday 30 January, the day that Hitler addressed the German people for the last time, the German army suddenly realized that the threat to Berlin was even greater than they had feared. Zhukov's leading units had not only penetrated the Meseritz defence zone with ease, they were within striking distance of the Oder. At 7.30 a.m., the headquarters of Army Group Vistula heard that the Landsberg road was 'full of enemy tanks'. Air reconnaissance flights were scrambled.

Himmler insisted on sending a battalion of Tiger tanks all on its own by train to restore the situation. His staff's protests had no effect because the Reichsführer SS was firmly convinced that a battalion of Tigers could defeat a whole Soviet tank army. The fifty-ton monsters were still fastened to their railway flat cars when they came under fire from three or four Soviet tanks. The battalion suffered heavy losses before the train managed to withdraw urgently towards Küstrin. Himmler wanted the battalion commander court-martialled until he was eventually persuaded that a Tiger tank fastened to a railway wagon was not in the best position to fight. During this time of extreme crisis, Himmler imitated Stalin's 'Not one step back' order of 1942, even if his version did not have the sa ring. It was entitled '
Tod und Strafe für Pflichtvergessenheif
- 'Death and punishment for failure to carry out one's duty'. It tried to end on uplifting note. 'After hard trials lasting several weeks the day will come he claimed, 'when German territories will be free again.' Another order forbade women on pain of severe punishment to give any food to retreating troops. And in an order of the day to Army Group Vistula he declared, 'The Lord God has never forsaken our people and he has always helped the brave in their hour of greatest need.' Both historically and theologically, this was an extremely dubious assertion.