All Hell Let Loose (101 page)

Friedrike Grensemann came home from work to find her father preparing to obey a summons to the Volkssturm. He handed her his pistol, saying, ‘It’s all over, my child. Promise me that when the Russians come you will shoot yourself.’ Then he kissed her and went off to die. Few Germans were any more impressed than Herr Grensemann by the home guard’s mobilisation. They parodied the song ‘
Die Wach am Rhein
’: ‘Dear Fatherland, set your mind at rest/the Führer has called the Grandpas up.’ Berliners stripped shops of such food as they could buy, then retired to the cellars that became their refuges through the days that followed. Ruth-Andreas Friedrich risked a brief sortie to the street in darkness, during a pause in Russian air raids. She saw the eastern sky reddened ‘as if blood had been poured over it’, and listened to the now incessant gunfire, ‘a grumbling like distant thunder. That’s no bombing, that’s … artillery … Before us lies the endless city, black in the black of night, cowering as if to creep back into the earth. And we’re afraid.’

Danish correspondent Jacob Kronika wrote that many Berliners now fervently desired their leader’s end. ‘Years ago they shouted “Heil!” Now they hate the man who calls himself their Führer. They hate him, they fear him; because of him they are suffering hardship and death. But they have neither the strength nor the nerve to free themselves from his demonic power. They wait, in passive desperation, for the final act of the drama.’

Behind the front, the Nazis indulged a final orgy of killing: jails were emptied, their occupants shot; almost all surviving opponents of the regime held in concentration camps were executed, and lesser victims massacred with a dreadful carelessness. On 31 March at Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe station, seventy-eight Italian workers suspected of looting a Wehrmacht supply train were rounded up and shot by firing squads. West of Hanover, the Gestapo murdered eighty-two imprisoned slave labourers and PoWs. On 6 April, 154 Soviet prisoners were killed in a prison at Lahde, and a further two hundred at Kiel. In the Nazis’ last days of power over life and death, Hitler’s doomed creatures sought to ensure that the joy of liberation was denied to all those within their reach.

Hundreds of thousands of prisoners were herded westwards, away from the Russians, and many were literally marched to death. Hugo Gryn, a Jew, described his experiences among a column of starving slaves on the road to Sachsenhausen: ‘When we left Lieberose, we were marched some distance away, stopped, and then heard lots of firing and then [there was] smoke. They killed and set on fire everybody who could not move out. This march was dreadful. Snow, mud. And when dusk came, turn left or turn right, walk into the nearest field, get down. In the morning, get up, except for those who could not get up, then we would move forward, wait a while, hear the shots and move on.’ Almost half of the 714,211 concentration camp prisoners held in the Reich in January 1945 were dead by May, along with many more PoWs. On 12 April, the German Philharmonic Orchestra gave its last performance, organised by Albert Speer. Beethoven’s Violin Concerto was performed with Bruckner’s 8th Symphony. So too was the finale of Wagner’s
Götterdämmerung
.

A last climactic battle remained. Since 1939, the spotlight of world attention had shifted again and again between place names great and obscure: from Warsaw to Dunkirk and Paris; London and Tobruk; Smolensk, Moscow and Stalingrad; El Alamein and Kursk; Salerno and Anzio; Normandy, Bastogne and Warsaw again. Now, Hitler’s capital became the focus not only of many hopes and fears, but also of a vast concentration of military power: the three Soviet
fronts
that massed before Berlin comprised 2.5 million men and 6,250 armoured vehicles, supported by 7,500 aircraft. In darkness in the early hours of 16 April, Zhukov launched a frontal assault against the Seelow Heights east of the city. The operation was among the most brutish and unimaginative of Russia’s war. Its commander was so impressed by watching his bombardment devastating the defences that after thirty minutes he gave the order to start the attack. A Russian engineer wrote home that night: ‘Along the whole length of the horizon it was bright as daylight. On the German side, everything was covered with smoke and thick fountains of earth in clumps flying up. There were huge flocks of scared birds flying around in the sky, a constant humming, thunder, explosions. We had to cover our ears to prevent our eardrums breaking. Then tanks began roaring, searchlights were lit along all of the front line in order to blind the Germans. Then people started shouting everywhere, “
Na Berlin!
”’

Russian infantry ran forward into the German minefields, while the first tanks clattered towards the Heights. Briefly, it seemed that the artillery had silenced the defences. But then the Germans opened fire. They had pulled back from forward positions, so that Zhukov’s bombardment fell on empty trenches. As Soviet tanks thrashed in deep mud on the slopes in their path, the attackers began to suffer terrible casualties. ‘We moved across terrain cratered from shellfire,’ wrote Soviet sapper Pyotr Sebelev. ‘Everywhere lay smashed German guns, vehicles, burning tanks and many corpses … Many of the Germans surrender. They don’t want to fight and give their life for Hitler.’ But many more continued to shoot. ‘Why drag out the misery?’ mused one despairing member of the Wehrmacht, whose wife and three children had drowned when the
Wilhelm Gustloff
refugee ship was torpedoed in the Baltic on 15 April. ‘But then, there’s still the other blokes. Many of them I’ve known for years. Am I going to leave them in the lurch?’

The Final Russian Assaults

Gen. Gotthard Heinrici’s defenders inflicted three Russian casualties for each of their own. There was no display of inspired Soviet generalship: Zhukov’s hordes merely threw themselves forward again and again. The Germans poured fire into the attackers, destroying tanks in hundreds and killing men in thousands. For two days, six Soviet armies battered at the Seelow line without achieving a breakthrough. Konev, in the south, was ordered to push forward two tank armies, while Rokossovsky in the north diverted forces to support Zhukov. On 18 April, Wehrmacht Corporal Helmut Fromm wrote from Konev’s sector: ‘Now we’re in front of Forst. The Russians have got a bridgehead across the Neisse, and attacked this morning at eleven. We had to pull back. I was left with a machine-gun and two men. I’m the only one who knows how to use a
Faust
– most of the others have only done office work. Then we rode very fast on bicycles up the Breslau–Berlin autobahn … Ivan’s guns are firing. Ten minutes ago Bohmer and Bucksbraun were wounded – Bohmer’s very badly cut up. We carried him back on a plank, screaming. Whose turn is it next? Gunfire from the road. To our left a flak 88 is under fire. I’m trying to dig as deep as I can. In the sky above us a Russian tank-buster is circling … If I survive, I shall give thanks to God.’

Hitler declined to send reinforcements to Heinrici, leaving Ninth Army to hold the Oder positions as best it could. Mass, not manoeuvre, at last enabled Zhukov to swamp the defences and push forward to reach Hitler’s outer Berlin line on 21 April; the capture of the Seelow Heights had cost the Russians 30,000 dead, the Germans 12,000. The attackers hastened on towards the city along the main road, Reichstrasse 1, as fugitives and deserters scurried and stumbled to stay ahead of them. ‘They all seem so miserable, so little like men any more,’ wrote a Berlin woman watching German soldiers shuffle past her apartment building on 22 April. ‘The only thing they inspire is pity, no hope or expectations. They already look defeated, captured. They stare past us blindly, impassively … They’re obviously not too concerned about us,
Volk
or civilians or Berliners or whatever we are. Now we’re nothing but a burden. And I don’t sense they’re the least ashamed of how bedraggled they look, how ragged. They’re too tired to care, too apathetic. They’re all fought out.’

By the 25th, Zhukov and Konev had encircled the German capital – an attempt by Wenck’s Twelfth Army to break the ring and bring relief was easily frustrated. The Russians began a week-long struggle to batter a path through the city street by street, block by block. The anti-tank ditches dug with such labour by tens of thousands of Berliners proved as futile as all such obstacles, but barricades of rubble heaped on old trams and rail trucks were more effective. Regular troops supported by old men and teenagers of the Hitler Youth fought the Russians with small arms, grenades, panzerfausts. The boy soldiers who died fighting for Berlin would have seemed especially tragic victims, had there not been so many others. Dorothea von Schwanenflügel described an encounter with one unhappy little figure, ‘a mere child in a uniform many sizes too large for him, with an anti-tank grenade lying beside him. Tears were running down his face, and he was obviously very frightened of everyone. I very softly asked him what he was doing there. He lost his distrust and told me that he had been ordered to lie in wait here, and when a Soviet tank approached he was to run under it and explode the grenade. I asked how that would work, but he didn’t know. In fact this frail child didn’t even look capable of carrying such a grenade.’ Another Berlin woman wrote likewise:

Neither side enjoyed scope for tactical subtlety in the battle for Berlin, there were merely a thousand savage local encounters in which the attackers measured each advance in yards. Again and again the first men to push forward were killed, the lead tanks destroyed; Soviet artillery and bombers pounded the defenders; whole streets were reduced to rubble. Siege artillery, 203mm howitzers, was brought forward to blast buildings whose occupants fired back over open sights while dust and smoke clogged the air. Stalin goaded his marshals by telephone from Moscow: tens of thousands of men paid with their lives as Zhukov and Konev conducted not a coordinated assault, but a race to fulfil their rival ambitions.

‘Berlin … presented a dreadful scene,’ wrote Swedish Red Cross representative Sven Frykman, surveying the beleaguered city by night. ‘A full moon shone from a cloudless sky so you could see the awful extent of the damage. A ghost town of cave dwellers was all that was left of this world metropolis … The imperial palace, all the splendid castles, the prince’s palace, the Royal Library, Tempelhof, the buildings along the Unter den Linden – hardly anything was left. Because of the moonlight which shone through all these empty windows and doorways, the city gave an even more grotesque impression than by daylight. Here and there a flame was still burning after the most recent bombing raids, and the fire brigades were at work. Burst pipes on some of the streets made you think of Venice and its canals.’

Helga Schneider wrote: ‘We are vegetating in a ghost town, without electric light or gas, without water, we are forced to think of personal hygiene as a luxury and hot meals as abstract concepts. We are living like ghosts in a vast field of ruins … a city where nothing works apart from the telephones that sometimes ring, glumly and pointlessly, beneath piles of fallen masonry.’ Not all calls were futile: the staff in Hitler’s bunker were reduced to seeking information by calling numbers in chosen areas to discover where the enemy had reached. As one quarter after another was overrun and Russian voices were heard, in cellars terrified civilians muttered to each other: ‘
Der Iwan kommt!
’

With so many Germans running away or surrendering at opportunity, it is extraordinary that resistance persisted for so long. Some 45,000 SS and Wehrmacht troops, together with 40,000 Volkssturm and a mere sixty tanks, held out for a week against the might of Zhukov’s and Konev’s armies. Street fighting is never easy, because it is hard to control and manoeuvre small groups of men clinging to precarious lodgements among buildings, and the struggle in that last week of April showed the power of despair. In Hitler’s capital, the Red Army paid the price for its policy of unrestrained savagery towards German soldiers and civilians: whatever the views of Hitler and the SS, it is hard to suppose that Berlin’s defenders would have fought so stubbornly had they entertained hopes of mercy for themselves or the population. As it was, the Soviet commitment to murder, rape and pillage was known to every German. Most of those manning the perimeter saw no prospect save that of death. Among the last-ditch defenders was a unit of the French Waffen SS Charlemagne Division. The commander of these doomed men, twenty-five-year-old Henri Fenet, was presented with the Knight’s Cross at a ceremony held in a wrecked tram, by candlelight. Fenet already had another medal: the Croix de Guerre, earned fighting for France in 1940.