Armageddon (95 page)

By sheer weight of fire and numbers, the Red Army ground down the exhausted defenders. German ammunition supplies began to fail. By the evening of 19 April, 1st Belorussian Front had broken through all the German outer defences and was closing on Berlin. Next day, Zhukov’s artillery began to fire on the city. The capture of the Seelow Heights had cost the Germans 12,000 dead, the Russians 30,000. In the north, Rokossovsky’s armies were pressing the German forces on the lower Oder. Konev reached the Spree and overran OKH headquarters at Zossen. His men found the teleprinters still rattling out messages from the surviving fragments of Hitler’s armies. The triumphant Konev begged Moscow to allow him to turn his two tank armies northwards, towards the capital. Stalin acceded.

Zhukov was now seriously alarmed that his rival marshal would defeat him in the race for Berlin. “In the course of three days the infantry have advanced 16 miles,” he signalled one of his armoured commanders, “and all this time the tanks have been dragging along behind them.” His officers were enraged to learn that the advance of some formations was being held up as men turned aside to loot. Some of the worst offenders in support units were transferred on the spot to rifle companies. Late on 20 April, Zhukov urged the commanders of his two Guards Tank Armies to the fulfilment of “a historic task: to break into Berlin first and to raise the banner of victory.” Soviet tank brigades entered the outskirts of Hitler’s capital next evening, the 21st. Zhukov urged them on, using the very goad Stalin had applied to himself and Konev: “Due to the slowness of our advance, the Allies are approaching Berlin and will soon take it.” Yet in built-up areas Soviet tanks found themselves as vulnerable to teenagers with fausts as their counterparts in Eisenhower’s armies. Zhukov pushed forward “fighting reconnaissance groups”—his penal companies, though these had been reduced to strengths of fifteen or twenty men in sacrificial actions at the Oder.

Even when the Russians began to bombard the streets, for many Berliners the need to find food overcame fear. They continued to queue at local shops as shells fell around them. “In Wilmersdorf, the local situation became acute about April 20th, a Friday,” wrote a Berlin housewife. “On the weekend, the firing came nearer and the streets grew very empty, except for women doggedly queueing for food, and occasional German tanks seeking or avoiding Russian outposts. On Monday, the ticket collector from our railway station got killed in a cigarette queue. On Tuesday morning, a shell swept over the bridge just as I was crossing it, and destroyed a baker’s shop with some of the people in it.” Germany’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs signalled its foreign missions: “Owing to the gravity of the situation and especially to administrative difficulties, the greater part of the Ministry has been moved to other quarters.” Missions were asked to confine their future transmissions to matters of urgent importance.

From the evening of 21 April onwards, Zhukov’s tanks were inching forward street by street, paying a price for every intersection. All-arms attack groups composed of tanks, infantry and assault guns worked in tandem, each supported by its own engineer and flamethrower platoons. The guns were responsible for blasting away buildings identified as centres of resistance. Then it was the business of infantry to occupy the debris and mop up. In the streets of Berlin, it was impossible to prevail by firepower alone. German soldiers holding positions in thick rubble were impregnable to anything save a direct hit. Progress could be made only by close-quarters fighting. Casualties on both sides were dreadful. “The first really wounded man I saw,” wrote a German housewife manning a Red Cross shelter, “was a boy who came straight from the street running, running, with the whole lower half of his face blown away, a bloody gap, no organ of speech left to scream, and his eyes still fully aware and sick with horror.”

Rokossovsky’s men of 2nd Belorussian Front were now pushing towards Berlin from the north. In the south, Konev lashed his own men on. “Third Guards Tank Army is conducting itself like a tape worm,” he signalled on 20 April: “one brigade is fighting and all the rest are creeping along behind.” Its commander was ordered to attack on a broader front. “Your formation has systematically disobeyed orders,” he told the leader of XXXVIII Corps on 21 April. “You seem afraid to attack. You overestimate the power of the enemy, and underrate your own. You treat every patch of woodland as a major obstacle. If you cannot do better than this, I shall have you sacked.” Zhukov echoed this brutal refrain: “I keep being told that operations are appallingly badly organized, that units are not properly deployed for street fighting,” he told his spearhead leaders on 22 April. “Fight around the clock—use searchlights!”

There was now a serious risk that Konev’s and Zhukov’s men would find themselves killing each other. Tanks of 1st Ukrainian Front were fighting their way into the southern suburbs of Berlin, after advancing more than a hundred miles from the Neisse in six days. To avert a collision, on 22 April Stalin imposed demarcation lines. Konev was ordered to advance towards the Anhalter railway station, halting some 150 yards short of the Reichstag and Hitler’s bunker. It would, after all, become Zhukov’s privilege, dearly bought by his soldiers, to seize the symbolic bastions of the Third Reich. This was bitterly resented by Konev’s officers. When one of them at last met Chuikov, Zhukov’s man, he protested that Chuikov was encroaching on 1st Ukrainian Front’s patch: “We’re advancing here!” Chuikov shrugged indifferently: “Sorry, I’ve got my own orders.” Thus did the cacophony of clashing egos compete with that of gunfire on the streets of Berlin.

The filth, stench and gloom in the shelters grew worse by the hour, as water supplies collapsed. Generators provided power only for a few hours, if at all. One of the largest shelters, the Anhalter Bahnhof next to the main station, housed 12,000 people in conditions so hideously cramped that they were unable to move, even to relieve themselves, for days on end. Even fetching water was a deadly business, when the station was among the principal targets for Soviet guns. At a local street shelter in a residential area, in one corner a woman fortunate enough to possess supplies brewed coffee or “stretched the soup,” as she called it. In another, people were urinating or defecating, because it was unthinkable to face the hell in the streets above to address the demands of nature. One of those tending the wounded in a Red Cross shelter was the British wife of a Berliner. On the evening of 27 April, an SS major arrived at the head of several hundred men, demanding to take over the shelter, evict its wretched occupants and create a defensive position. She argued desperately with him, all the time terrified that someone would cry out: “She’s English!” At last, he went away. Soon afterwards one of her charges, a Ukrainian girl, went into labour amid the relentless shelling above. The baby was born at five past eight on the morning of 28 April, It was christened Piotr, and laid in an office filing tray. Then an elderly local gardener came in, with six holes in his back, “one as big as your hand.” As they strove to dress his wounds, he told his story. He and his wife had sheltered from the barrage in the garden shed on their allotment, until a near-miss blew the entire structure away, tore his clothes to rags and inflicted hideous shrapnel wounds. His wife died on the spot from a heart attack. The man clutched his only undamaged possession, a red and purple bowtie. “I love that tie,” he said, gazing wonderingly upon it as the world collapsed. “But I must give it away, now that I am in mourning.” Bullets sometimes whipped for thousands of yards across empty air until somewhere in the city, far from immediate fighting, they found a billet in flesh or masonry. A woman sitting up in the bed where she had taken refuge beside her husband, with no sense of imminent peril, was killed by a round fired a mile or more away, which ricocheted off the wall. A pall of dust and smoke shrouded the whole city, as street by street the battle seeped into its remotest recesses.

Hitler raved on 23 April: “The enemy knows I am here. That could provide the best opportunity for us to lead him into a trap here . . . Everyone must work honestly!” The Army Chief of Staff, Hans Krebs, said: “I believe we still have four days.” Hitler said: “In four days, the thing will have been decided.” By 25 April, Berlin was entirely encircled. A total of 464,000 Soviet troops, supported by 12,700 guns, 1,500 tanks and 21,000 Katyusha mountings, were deployed for the last act. By 27 April, the German perimeter had shrunk to an area some ten miles long by three wide, from which billowing clouds of smoke rose into the sky. Berliners now called their city the
Reichsscheiterhaufen
—“funeral pyre of the Reich.” Zhukov’s men achieved an important tactical triumph for their commander by forestalling Konev’s tanks to reach the Landwehr Canal, in front of the Tiergarten. The 1st Ukrainian Front swung west, to clear the further side of the city, to the intense disappointment of Konev and his officers. Zhukov was left alone to complete the destruction of the last few acres of ruined streets, monuments and public buildings which remained to Hitler’s empire.

Some 45,000 German soldiers maintained the defence, along with 40,000 Volkssturm and 3,000 children of the Hitler Jugend. Foremost among this forlorn hope were men of foreign SS units gathered around the bunker, the government buildings of the Wilhelmstrasse, the Reich Chancellery. Balts, Frenchmen, Scandinavians and Walloons wearing Himmler’s runes on their tunics knew that they were a legion of the dead, beyond hope of mercy. Their will to resist was reinforced by SS squads which roamed the streets hanging from the lampposts every man who sought to quit. The defenders of Berlin knew that they must fight and die, or hang and die.

Hitler spent a sleepless night on 26 April, amid the relentless shelling and bombing. He told his military conference next morning: “Today I will lie down a little more at ease, and I only want to be awakened if a Russian tank is standing in front of my room, so I have time to make my preparations.” The first of these, of course, was his marriage to Eva Braun. An NKVD team sent to Berlin with the explicit mission of searching for Hitler or his corpse arrived in the city on 29 April with little expectation that they would have work to do. The Russians were convinced that Hitler would flee before the Red Army reached his bunker—indeed, that he had probably already done so. As the Russian team drove in darkness to the Red Army’s tactical headquarters through the shattered streets, the first thought of their interpreter Yelena Kogan was that the anti-tank ditches looked exactly like the ones tens of thousands of Russians, including herself, had dug around Moscow three years earlier. “The whole scene was apocalyptic,” she said, “relentless gunfire, searchlights probing the sky, burning and collapsing buildings caught in their beams.” At Army headquarters, the NKVD group sat down patiently to await the outcome of the battle. The only seat Yelena could find was a petrol can, on which she passed many of the hours that followed.

The first flimsy news of Hitler reached the Russians in unexpected fashion. A prisoner was brought in—a civilian ventilation engineer. He said that he had been called to the bunker to repair a fault in its air-circulation system. The man was sullen, numb, monosyllabic. Patiently, they questioned him. “There was a wedding yesterday,” he declared suddenly. “The Führer married Eva Braun.” They looked at him as if he was mad. How could there be a wedding, in the heart of Berlin, in these last days? The NKVD team did not believe a word of it.

Even in the midst of this climactic battle alcoholic excess, the curse of the Red Army, provoked grotesque incidents. Zhukov’s military prosecutor recorded an episode on 27 April, when the commander of LXXXV Tank Corps became drunk and ordered German women to be brought to him, whom he raped. When Russian soldiers approached his headquarters, he mistook them for Germans and ordered a self-propelled gun to open fire, killing four men and wounding six. The court-martial case against him had to be dropped, allegedly for “lack of proof.” From the top, real efforts were being made to stem the manic indiscipline threatening military operations, yet among the fighting formations such matters were still not arousing concern. Zhukov’s headquarters reported that “commanders are taking serious steps to stop ‘improper behaviour,’ but some still delude themselves that the situation is under control.” The Red Army’s rampage in Berlin began long before the battle was over.

Private Bruno Bochum was one of those German soldiers who possessed no stomach for a hero’s death. He was crewing a 105mm gun emplaced in a tank turret by Tegel airfield on the north-west side of Berlin. “It was crazy! There was no real command.” Their gun possessed only ten rounds of ammunition. They fired it once, at a low-flying aircraft strafing the runway. On 26 April, a Russian tank clattered past the rear of their position, laden with tommy-gunners. The Germans could have fired at it, but decided that discretion was the better part of survival. The gun crew agreed to scatter and make for a rendezvous in the Grünewald, the woodland west of the city. Bochum set off with one comrade through empty streets, moving in a series of sprints and cautious halts, listening to the artillery fire. They reached the Olympic Stadium, where they found many other stragglers, and lay down exhausted to sleep on its stepped tiers. At first light next day, they set off again. After desultory encounters with Russian patrols, they chanced upon a Wehrmacht headquarters. Bochum was taken before a general, whom he found reading the Roman author Livy amid a mounting artillery barrage. The general questioned him about his personal service; presented him on the spot with the Iron Cross, Second Class; and entrusted him with command of thirty-six men on the south of their modest perimeter.

Bochum thought: “What on earth is the point of this foolishness now?” But, like so many German soldiers for so many years past, he did what he was told. They started digging. Then Bochum fell asleep. When he woke next morning, only two men of his command remained, to defend a frontage of 600 yards. There was small-arms fire on all sides—the Russians were well beyond them. A Katyusha salvo landed close by. A fragment of shrapnel embedded itself in Bochum’s purse, and another opened his neck. He found somebody to bandage his wound, then returned to find his two-man command still in their positions. “Throw away your weapons,” he told them. “It’s over.”