After Hitler: The Last Ten Days of World War II in Europe (5 page)

General Dwight Eisenhower – Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force – now took a crucial decision. He decided that Anglo-American forces would halt on the River Elbe. An exception was made for Montgomery’s 21st Army Group to the north, which would cross the river and strike at the Baltic ports of Lübeck and Wismar. Denmark could then be secured by the Western Allies, ahead of the Russians. In the centre, American armies would halt at the river boundary; in the south, they would push on into Bavaria and western Austria.

Eisenhower’s decision to halt on the Elbe minimised the chances of American and Russian forces colliding. However, the military intelligence behind it was faulty – a concern over the so-called National Redoubt, an Alpine fortress guarded by elite SS divisions where it was believed Hitler and his followers would make a final stand. The evidence for such a mountain fastness was largely illusory, but once Goebbels realised the American preoccupation with it he delightedly arranged for a mass of false documentation to fall into their hands – most of it concocted within his Propaganda Ministry. General Omar Bradley, commander of the 12th Army Group and a close personal friend of Eisenhower, would later confess ruefully that ‘it was amazing how we fell for this in the way we did’.

United States forces were racing southwards to secure a fairy-tale fortress complex that in reality was non-existent, and the decision to halt at the Elbe left Berlin to the Russians. Eisenhower had conferred with General Bradley about the likely cost in American lives of reaching the German capital. Bradley reckoned about 100,000 men – ‘a lot for a prestige objective’ – and General George Marshall, the army chief of staff, concurred. Eisenhower allowed the Red Army the honour of storming Hitler’s capital, knowing that Soviet troops would also pay the price in casualties to take the city. He communicated directly with Stalin, saying that Berlin was no longer a major objective for him – he would be halting his armies on the Elbe and pushing south-east instead.

Stalin was taken aback. Bluffing, he said that Berlin was no longer of particular importance to him either, and then summoned his military commanders Zhukov and Konev and ordered them to take the city as soon as possible. The assault would take place on 16 April 1945. Zhukov launched the main Russian offensive directly against the last German defence line, the Seelow Heights on the western bank of the Oder, and headed straight for Berlin.

On the same day Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front crossed the Oder farther south and wheeled round the German capital. By 23 April the city was encircled and no further supplies or reinforcements would reach its defenders. Stalin – who knew Churchill was still lobbying for an attack – wanted to block any last-ditch attempt by the Western Allies to reach Berlin. But Eisenhower kept his promise to the Soviet leader and Roosevelt’s successor, President Harry Truman, was content to let him do so. Even when General Wenck’s 12th Army pulled out of the German battle line on the Elbe, on the same day, and marched east in an attempt to save Berlin, American troops kept to their agreed position on the far side of the river. The Grand Alliance held firm.

Within the German capital, hasty defence measures were put in place when it was realised Hitler intended to make a stand there. But there were so few troops available. On 23 April General Helmuth Weidling, commander of the LVI Panzer Corps, was appointed commander of the city. A day earlier the Führer had ordered Weidling to be executed by firing squad for having retreated in the face of the enemy. The charge was then dropped, but Weidling was unenthusiastic about his new post. ‘I’d rather be shot than have this honour,’ he exclaimed.

Weidling organised the defences into eight sectors. He had about 45,000 regular troops available, supported by the Berlin police force, the Hitler Youth, and about 40,000 men of the Home Guard (
Volkssturm
). Soviet forces outnumbered them by eight to one. The soldiers of the LVI Panzer Corps were known to the Russians already, for in the spring of 1944 they had been responsible for the worst atrocity ever committed by the German army in the Soviet Union, the creation of typhus camps where more than 50,000 civilians in the region of Parichi were deliberately infected, and then left in the path of the advancing Red Army, with the hope of causing a major typhoid epidemic among the Russian soldiers. In the words of General Pavel Batov, commander of the Soviet 65th Army, ‘this atrocity we would neither forgive nor forget’. The fight for Berlin would always have been bitter, but the presence of LVI Panzer Corps in the city, which quickly became known to the Russians, ensured the battle was particularly savage.

Over the next few days German troops mounted a desperate defence, but the Russians closed inexorably on Berlin’s centre. On 27 April General Weidling wrote in his diary:

At 5.00 a.m., after a violent bombardment and with very strong air support, the Russians attacked on both sides of the Hohenzollerndamm. Defence Zone Headquarters is under heavy fire. The account for the sins of past years has arrived.

The Potsdamer Platz is also under heavy artillery bombardment. Brick and stone dust hangs in the air like a thick fog. The car in which I am driving can only make slow progress – shells are bursting on all sides and we are showered with their fragments.

Everywhere the roads are full of craters and broken brickwork, and streets and squares lie desolate. To take cover from a Russian heavy mortar bombardment we took shelter in an Underground Station. In the two-level building many civilians had taken refuge – a mass of scared people, standing packed together. It is a shattering sight.

In my afternoon situation report, I spoke of the sufferings of the population and the wounded, about everything I had seen with my own eyes during the day. Hitler seemed in a disjointed state of mind, unable to properly comprehend what I was saying.

Time was now running out. On 28 April Admiral Karl Dönitz flew a battalion of naval cadets into stricken Berlin as a gesture of solidarity with his Führer. The commander, Lieutenant Franz Kuhlmann, remembered his nightmarish arrival: ‘Towards the end of our flight we recognized the capital, burning from a recent bombing raid. It was a truly apocalyptic picture. Despite the lack of contact from the radio tower, our pilot immediately attempted a landing and the plane careered wildly all over the runway.’

In the circumstances, a rough landing was hardly surprising. On 27 April both Tempelhof and Gatow airports had been lost to the Russians. An emergency landing strip was then prepared in the grounds of Berlin’s zoo. This was where Kuhlmann had arrived. By the evening of 28 April this landing strip could not be used either, because of the deep shell holes.

Kuhlmann continued:

When we came to a juddering halt there was a sharp command – ‘To the shelters – at the double!’ – and we raced towards an enormous concrete silo, where military stores and equipment were kept.

In a while, an SS officer appeared, and told us we had been ordered to the Zoo Bunker [a key defence point in the centre of Berlin]. When I objected, and said we had been instructed to go immediately to the Reich Chancellery, to defend Hitler’s own quarters, he looked completely bewildered. Eventually we set off in an easterly direction, towards this seemingly prestige objective – along a bombed-out military road. Time and time again we were forced to dive for cover, as Russian planes swept down, strafing the route ahead.

The SS officer accompanied me to Mohnke’s command post – in one of the underground shelters of the Reich Chancellery – announced my arrival to the general, and then disappeared. SS General Mohnke, the commander of Citadelle [the government district of Berlin, with Hitler’s bunker at its heart] was surprised and delighted to see us, showing a degree of interest that was flattering in view of our relatively insignificant combat strength.

General Mohnke had about 2,000 men under his command – including 800 soldiers from the elite Leibstandarte SS Guard Battalion. These formed the last bulwark against the Russians. Kuhlmann continued:

Mohnke inquired carefully about the number of men I had brought, their weaponry and combat experience – quickly grasping that most were cadets, and neither properly equipped or trained for this kind of fighting. His manner was well-disposed and friendly, until I perhaps unwisely told him that I was under orders to announce myself to Hitler personally. Then his tone changed. He told me bluntly that it was hardly practicable for every junior officer to request an audience with the Führer.

Kuhlmann accommodated his men in the cellars of the nearby Foreign Office and awaited further orders. The artillery fire raining down on the Reich Chancellery became ever more violent, as groups of Red Army soldiers began to approach Citadelle’s defences.

Despite the command to stay put, Kuhlmann was summoned into the labyrinth of the Führer Bunker. Dönitz, keen to curry favour with his master, asked – through his representative in the bunker, Admiral Hans-Erich Voss – that the marine battalion’s commander formally present himself. The Führer assented – and Kuhlmann descended into this subterranean world. A shock awaited him. He arrived at the lower section of the bunker as Hitler was holding a situation conference. Voss was presiding, with General Hans Krebs, Joseph Goebbels and Artur Axmann (the head of the Hitler Youth) also present.

Kuhlmann recalled:

Hitler’s body had completely shrunk in on itself. His left arm and leg shook uncontrollably. Much of what he said was incomprehensible to me – it was as if, in a state of delirium, he had discovered a completely made-up language. Odd fragments of it lodged in my mind. An oft-repeated refrain: ‘Oh those citizens of Berlin! Those citizens of Berlin!’ or ‘One can never do without a Hanna Reitsch!’ [the woman pilot who had just then audaciously landed a plane on the Unter der Linden, Berlin’s main throughfare]. Knowing nothing of what had happened to him in this vault, I was unable to make any coherent sense of such disjointed outpourings.

The reference to a ‘made-up language’ is striking. It may have been partly the result of extreme stress and disorientation, but it strongly suggests that the Führer had never fully recovered from his breakdown of 22 April. ‘Hitler then dismissed me,’ Kuhlmann continued, ‘by offering his steadier right hand, and I climbed with Voss back up the bunker stairs. Although I was deeply shaken, I said nothing of my impression to Voss – and he also avoided saying any word about the state Hitler was in. But I noticed that he was aware of my embarrassment, and probably guessing the reason for it, talked about plans to bring more naval troops into Berlin instead.’

When General Weidling found that much of the last defence line was ‘manned’ by the Hitler Youth (teenage boys aged between fourteen and eighteen), he ordered Axmann to disband such combat formations within the city. The order was never carried out. On 29 April Hitler Youth courier Armin Lehmann and three of his comrades tried to carry an urgent message to a command post across the Wilhemstrasse – now being pulverised by Russian shells. Lehmann was the only survivor. Later, he sat in the Führer Bunker in a state of shock. A woman came out of one of the rooms and poured him a glass of water. ‘It’s terrible out there,’ she said. It was Eva Braun – Hitler’s long-term mistress, whom he had married only hours earlier.

Within the bunker, fatalistic despair reigned. Hearing that his deputy Hermann Göring, in Obersalzberg in Bavaria, was attempting to take control of the leadership, Hitler had him arrested. On 28 April Hitler also learnt that Heinrich Himmler was putting out peace feelers to the Western Allies. Himmler’s representative in Berlin, Hermann Fegelein, was rounded up and shot. The Führer then began putting his own affairs in order. He married Eva Braun early on the morning of 29 April – less an occasion of celebration, more of a suicide pact – and drew up his private and public wills. Göring and Himmler were both expelled from the party for their treachery. Impressed by the loyalty of Admiral Dönitz, and recently reminded of it by Kuhlmann’s visit, Hitler designated him as his successor. He hoped that Dönitz’s government – to be set up in Schleswig-Holstein in northern Germany – would also be joined by Bormann and Goebbels.

Hitler’s secretary, Traudl Junge, typed out the copies of Hitler’s will. ‘I worked as fast as I could,’ Junge recalled. ‘My fingers moved mechanically and I was amazed to see I made hardly any typing errors. Bormann, Goebbels and the Führer himself kept coming in to see if I’d finished yet. They made me nervous and only delayed matters. Finally they almost tore the last sheet out of the typewriter, went back into the conference room, signed the three copies and sent them out by courier.’ One was sent to Dönitz in northern Germany. Another went to Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner in Czechoslovakia. Impressed by his fanatical loyalty to the Nazi cause, the Führer had appointed Schörner as the new head of the German armed forces. ‘With that, Hitler’s life was really over,’ Junge continued. ‘Now he was hoping for confirmation that at least one of these documents had reached its intended destination. At any moment now, we expected the Russians to storm our bunker, so close the sounds of war seemed to be … We were trapped there and just sat waiting.’

Early on 30 April news came through that General Wenck’s 12th Army was unable to make further progress and no relief of Berlin was possible. Hitler and Eva Braun both decided to commit suicide. The Führer’s preoccupation that morning was that enough gasoline be found to completely burn his corpse. The previous day he had learnt of the death of his ally, Benito Mussolini, who had been executed by Italian partisans. Mussolini’s body – and that of his mistress, Clara Petrucci – was then strung up by its heels. Hitler resolved that his own corpse would not be made a spectacle of.

‘The 30th April began like the days before it,’ Junge recalled. ‘The hours dragged slowly by … We ate lunch with Hitler. The same conversation as yesterday, the day before yesterday, for many days past: a banquet of death under the mask of cheerful composure.’ After lunch, Junge went to smoke a cigarette in the servants’ room. She was told the Führer wanted to say goodbye.