Killing Hitler (47 page)

In a sense, Speer never escaped Hitler’s shadow. Imprisoned in Spandau after the war, he would confide to his diary that he was still “always listening to [Hitler’s] voice, hearing him clear his throat, seeing his slightly stooped figure before [his] eyes.”
¹⁰⁸
He would even dream about him. “They are always the same,” he said of his dreams. “About his knowing what I was doing against him, including my wanting to kill him.”
¹⁰⁹
Hitler’s hold on him, he complained, was still too strong.
¹¹⁰
Therein, perhaps, lay the root cause of his inability to play the role of assassin.

Epilogue

Berlin: Monday, 30 April 1945, dawn

As a gray dawn lit the eastern skies over Berlin, the capital of Hitler’s Reich was preparing for its final struggle. The morning was cool, with a damp breeze blowing down off the Baltic. It brought an unseasonable chill to the city’s inhabitants—Germans and Soviets alike—huddled in the bombed-out buildings, squalid cellars, and makeshift shelters. The brightening skies revealed a chaos of rubble-strewn streets littered with corpses, burned-out vehicles, and the detritus of war. The stench of death and decay was everywhere. Smoke twisted and eddied, while dust and ash covered everything that failed to move. Smashed façades of houses stood like rotten teeth. The famed linden trees, now splintered and broken, were gamely struggling into leaf. There was no dawn chorus; sunrise was greeted only by the thunder of artillery,
the sporadic crackle of gunfire, and the eerie scream
of Katyusha
rockets. All life that could escape the doomed city was long gone. Only soldiers and stranded civilians remained.

Elsewhere in the Reich, the scene was little better. Hitler held sway over two narrowing strips of territory, stretching from Rostock in the north to Salzburg in the south. Once the undisputed master of the continent, Hitler now controlled only two of Europe’s capitals: Berlin and Prague. His once-victorious armies were in disarray and in retreat. In the west, mass surrenders of troops had become commonplace, and the invading armies were often met by white flags and scenes of liberation rather than conquest. Isolated pockets of resistance, particularly in the Ruhr, were encircled and contained as the front line moved inexorably eastward. As the fronts converged, the Soviet and American vanguards had met in celebration at Torgau on the Elbe, west of Berlin, five days previously. The remnant of Hitler’s Germany had been bisected, its capital cut off from its Bavarian heartland. On 30 April, the British 2nd Army was approaching Hamburg, which would be taken three days later. Munich, the birthplace of Nazism, would fall to the Americans that very morning.

In the east, meanwhile, the conflict with the Soviets had lost none of its ferocity. The Balkans had been cleared, and Budapest and Vienna had fallen. From there the front line encircled Bohemia to the east, then ran northwest to the remains of Dresden, then north to Berlin, which had been encircled by the Soviet Army on 25 April. To the east of that line, the roads were clogged with German refugees trudging west, entirely at the mercy of their new Soviet masters. Active resistance behind the front had been all but snuffed out. Only the city of Breslau refused to submit. It was enduring its seventy-fourth day under siege. Now some 80 kilometers behind Soviet lines, all hope of relief had been abandoned, but the fanatics preached continued defiance. The siege, with all its attendant miseries, still had six days to run.

The morning of 30 April brought liberation to the Ravens-brück women’s concentration camp 80 kilometers north of Berlin. It had been established in May 1939 to house some six
thousand prisoners, but by October 1944, numbers had swelled to forty-two thousand. In mid-April 1945, a number of German inmates had been set free; others were handed over to the Red Cross and taken to Sweden. Some then had to endure a forced march west, leaving a remnant of around three thousand starving and sick individuals being cared for by fellow inmates. Their SS captors had fled.

As the Soviet Army arrived that morning, one survivor found herself in the nearby men’s camp. The sights that greeted her there were “heartbreaking”:

800 men are there, 400 of them dead or dying, lying on top of one another, and the remainder are not much better…. For eight days there has been no water, and the men are dying from hunger and thirst. It is just terrible. They don’t even look like people, rather just distraught shadows of themselves. All that they have gone through has robbed them of their sanity. It is unbelievable and unimaginable.
¹

They were nonetheless among the lucky ones. Ravensbrück is thought to have claimed the lives of some sixty thousand inmates, among them the SOE agent Violette Szabo.

Berlin, meanwhile, had been cut off for five days. It had been subjected to one of the most intense assaults ever witnessed in human history. Some 2.5 million Soviet soldiers had massed east of the German capital. Divided between the rival Generals Zhukov and Konev, their primary objective was to enclose the city to prevent any German relief or, indeed, breakout. The two sides of the Soviet pincer had met at Ketzin, west of Potsdam, the previous week. They had established a formidable barrier—the German 9th Army, which had been caught in their jaws, had been all but destroyed—but it was not wholly impervious. The German 12th Army, under General Wenck, was still fighting to the southwest of Berlin, some 50 kilometers from the city center. Though supposedly battling their way in to relieve the capital,
Wenck’s men were, in reality, only able to provide a brief exit route for some of the units shattered by the Soviet advance. Then they, too, joined the weary exodus to the west.

They were leaving a dying city. Supplies of electricity, gas, and water had practically ceased. The transportation network had ground to a halt. Key streets had been barricaded and bridges had been rigged with dynamite. The last plane had left Tempelhof airfield a week before, and the makeshift airstrip on the East-West Axis was repeatedly blocked by shellfire or crashed aircraft. Police and fire brigades had been stood down and ordered to join their nearest military unit. Public order was maintained by the lynch law of the SS and Gestapo.

Life for the many civilians left stranded in the capital was unutterably gruesome. Caught between the rock of German intransigence and the hard place of Soviet revenge, they had been reduced to a subterranean, nocturnal existence, huddling in cellars and rarely venturing out before dark. Nonetheless, hunger forced many out onto the streets to queue for what scarce provisions there were, or to participate in the looting of the city’s commercial districts. Those who were caught looting could face a swift trial by a “flying court-martial.” Execution was the usual sentence, and the corpses of the unfortunates would be hung from trees and lampposts or street barricades as a deterrent. It is thought that over a thousand Berliners met their end in this way.
²

For those who remained at home, the perils were no less immediate. Men of military age lived in fear of discovery by the SS, which could result in forced conscription into a punishment battalion, or a summary execution. Discovery by the Soviets, meanwhile, could mean death or a lengthy sentence in the gulag. Those who sought to avoid the horrors by flying a white flag as the front line approached were ill advised. The gesture was not always recognized by the Soviets, and discovery by the Germans would invariably invite the death penalty.

Young women, meanwhile, lived in fear of rape. In self-preservation, they swathed themselves in head scarves, blackened their faces, and kept their legs covered. Some even contrived to feign an infectious disease—scarlet fever was a favorite—or to
play at insanity. Those with blond hair were especially at risk, and families would often conspire to hide a young daughter, granddaughter, or niece. The first echelon of Soviet soldiers were, in the main, impeccably behaved and more concerned with combat than anything else. But once they had passed, the next echelon wrought havoc. They usually came at night. Initially they demanded watches and alcohol. Then they would return, often drunk, with the chilling refrain of
“Frau komm!”
Those Berliners that survived the ordeal would curse their misfortune in cheating death. In Berlin alone, there were thought to have been over a hundred thousand rapes committed during the siege.
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Around ten thousand of those victims died, mostly by their own hand.

Considering the size of Berlin’s population, there was a definite shortage of shelters for civilians. Though there were a number of purpose-built air-raid shelters dotted around the capital, many Berliners sought refuge in the tunnels of the underground system, where they were comparatively safe from the carnage aboveground. However, fears among the SS of a Soviet advance through the tunnels led to the decision to flood them by blowing a section of tunnel beneath the Landwehr Canal. Estimates of the extent of civilian casualties vary enormously, but the numbers drowned must run to several hundred.
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Another option was to seek shelter in one of the anti-aircraft complexes. One of the most famous of these was located close to the Berlin Zoo. Built in 1940–41 as part of a ring of flak installations, the zoo tower was enormous. Standing more than 40 meters high, with walls of reinforced concrete nearly 2.5 meters thick, it resembled a medieval fortress—square in profile, with a turret at each corner. Beneath the roof, where four batteries of guns and flak crews were stationed, it consisted of a garrison, hospital, warehouse, and air-raid shelter capable of accommodating more than fifteen thousand civilians. It was well defended and well supplied, with its own independent water supply and electrical generators. It was known to the Berliners as “the safest coffin in the world.”
⁵

On 30 April, however, it resembled hell on earth. The entire complex shook with the constant thunder of incoming Soviet
rounds and the reply of the anti-aircraft artillery—now lowered to target the ground forces approaching the Reichstag. Beneath its walls, Berlin’s once-famous zoo was now a hades of freshly dug graves, screeching birds, and broken, dying animals. Inside the tower, the stench of disinfectant and cordite mingled with the sweat and urine of up to thirty thousand terrified Berliners. After a number of days, sanity was becoming a precious commodity. Suicides were so common that they were no longer counted. In the crush, they were often not even noticed until they began to decompose.
⁶

The area of the capital controlled by Hitler’s forces had shrunk rapidly since the city had been cut off. By the morning of 30 April, the central residential areas of Moabit, Lichtenberg, and Wilmersdorf had been lost. To the west, the old island fortress of Spandau would hold out for two more days. To the southwest, German troops on Wannsee Island were still resisting a determined Soviet assault. Beyond that, only the government district remained in German hands: a shrinking corridor running approximately from the Tiergarten in the west to Friedrichshain in the east, bounded to the south by the Landwehr Canal and to the north by the river Spree. That area was defended by a motley assortment of Axis forces, with élite paratroop and Waffen-SS units fighting side by side with the teenagers of the Hitler Youth and the old men of the
Volkssturm
militia. Numerous nationalities were also represented, with Belgians, Danes, and Dutch fighting alongside the Germans. One Waffen-SS unit, for example, whose final command post was just yards from Hitler’s bunker, was a curious amalgam of French, Swedes, and Norwegians. It was commanded by candlelight from a wrecked underground train. Berlin was staging the last hurrah of the European extreme right.

Hitler’s forces utilized similar strategies to those employed with some success in sieges elsewhere. Now largely bereft of heavy armor, which had either been pulverized or run out of fuel, they relied on creating fortified strongpoints, such as pillboxes and machine-gun nests, so as to slow the Soviet advance. In addition, small tank-killing units were formed, equipped with the disposable
Panzerfaust
bazooka. Such detachments would hunt down the massed Soviet T-34 tanks in the Berlin streets, seeking to nullify the Soviets’ numerical advantage. Among their most effective exponents were the French soldiers of the
SS-Charlemagne
Division, who were said to have claimed over fifty kills in the central sector alone.
⁷

The Soviets, meanwhile, naturally sought to exploit their dominance in men and machinery. Rather than launch a headlong attack en masse, however, they were divided into countless small, self-contained, assault groups, which would seek simultaneously to storm enemy positions from many directions with support from tanks.
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When beaten back or facing stubborn resistance, they could call in an artillery strike or the withering fire of the
Katyusha
mobile rocket launchers. There was little that could resist their attentions for long.

By the morning of 30 April, the desperate defense of Berlin was reaching its denouement. The previous night, the 150th Rifle Division of the Soviet 3rd Shock Army had forced the Moltke Bridge and had taken up position close to the Reichstag. The former German parliament was seen by Stalin, somewhat bizarrely, as the symbol of Hitler’s power. Its significance among his troops had been raised to the status of a trophy of war. It was “the lair of the Fascist beast,” the “Bandit capital,” and its capture—timed to coincide with the May Day parade in Moscow—was to be the ultimate demonstration of Soviet power.

That morning, the first waves of Soviet infantry had met stiff resistance. The damp air was filled with acrid smoke and a cacophony of small-arms fire, artillery, and rocket launchers. For the Soviets, progress toward their target was murderously slow. Heavy fire seemed to rain in on them from all quarters. In addition, their approach was littered with obstacles. As one war reporter noted: “If there had been no fighting, this distance could be crossed in a few minutes, but it now seemed impassable, covered with shell holes, railway sleepers, pieces of wire and trenches.”
⁹
An awesome array of Soviet artillery was brought up in support, to subdue the German defenders. By midafternoon,
the forward Soviet units had entered the ruins of the Reichstag. A further eight hours of bitter hand-to-hand fighting awaited them before the Soviet flag was finally raised from the roof.