Armageddon (96 page)

The difficulty now was to find someone to whom he might surrender. He met a Russian riding an American Harley-Davidson motorcycle who refused to notice him. He walked cautiously onwards until he rounded a corner and saw a T-34, its crew standing around it, obviously extremely drunk. He took out the white handkerchief he had carried since 6 June 1944 for this very situation, and advanced with his hands high in the air, clutching his symbol of surrender. He was amazed when the first Russian he reached embraced him warmly before taking his watch. “
Wonia
kaputt!
” announced the Russian joyously. “The war’s over!” This statement was, of course, premature. But it sufficed for these Red soldiers that their own part was done. Bochum was taken into a headquarters where another Russian presented him with a box of cigars, and led him to an officer frying chicken. He was briskly interrogated by a Jewish soldier who spoke perfect German. Then he was pushed into a room full of officer prisoners, where he spent the night. As Bochum joined a long, long column of PoWs being escorted to imprisonment next morning, he merely felt profound relief that his own war was over, that he had survived. “I had my first good rest for weeks, free of fear.”

Johannes and Regina Krakowitz seldom left the basement of their apartment building at Gohenstrasse 5, in the eastern part of Berlin, after 20 April, Hitler’s birthday. There were perhaps fifty occupants, united in misery and fear. It was their good fortune that there was a butcher’s shop on the ground floor. Once during the battle, miraculously the shop had meat. The basement-dwellers risked everything to join the queue. Though one man was injured by shrapnel, they got something to eat, and thought themselves lucky. At moments of desperate need, the Krakowitzes climbed upstairs to their flat to use the lavatory or wash, for as long as water remained available. Otherwise, “we sat in that cellar as if we were paralysed.” There were too few chairs, so they took it in turns to sit down. There was Frau Bloch and her son, the Krakowitzes’ neighbours. The boy was twenty, and no one could imagine how he had escaped military service. Herr Wendt, who owned a little soap shop, was there—a small man with a comically larger wife. They played gin rummy hour after hour, day after day. Herr Scalimper, a dairy owner, had been drafted unwillingly to join his Volkssturm unit, but his wife and mother were in the cellar, sharing the terrors. When the occupants talked at all, which was seldom, they discussed banal matters, such as what commodities it was possible to buy with ration stamps. The thunder of gunfire and explosions came closer every hour, until someone came down to say that the Russians were at the Prenzlauerallee S-Bahn station, just 200 yards away. That afternoon, 29 April, Hitler and Eva Braun killed themselves in the
Führerbunker.
Their bodies were burned by Otto Günsche, the SS adjutant.

Everywhere across the city, human flotsam was suing for mercy, some less deserving than others. A deputation of diplomats from the Japanese embassy, whose nation was still not at war with Russia, appeared at Soviet headquarters to demand protection, and the return of its looted property, including three cars. A cluster of Ukrainian women saw a Volkssturm man raise a white sheet, only to be killed by his own commander. A Wehrmacht officer emerged from a tunnel to negotiate the safe passage of 1,100 civilians sheltering in the darkness. When he had seen them delivered into the custody of Soviet submachine gunners, he announced that he was returning to his own soldiers, in fulfilment of his military oath. A Soviet officer drew a pistol and shot him down.

On the morning of 30 April, a refugee in the basement of the Krakowitzes’ apartment building braved the journey upstairs to listen to a radio. The man returned to declare solemnly, yet in a voice somehow drained of emotion, that the Russians occupied their street. Regina Krakowitz thought simply: “Thank God there will be no more bombing and shelling.” Slowly and cautiously, they crept up from their shelter to find that the battle was dying out. Frau Krakowitz was not raped, for which she was forever grateful. “We came through it pretty lucky,” she said laconically. Others did not. Margrit Hug was marched by three Russians from the cellar in which she had been cowering for a week and taken to a chemist’s cellar: “Was pushed to the ground, some clothes torn off me,” she wrote in her diary. “[They] took it in turns to hold the torch. I am not 18.”

All that day of 30 April, Russian troops fought yard by yard towards the Reichstag and Kroll Opera House, against a storm of German fire. Smoke and dust rendered it hard to see more than a few hundred yards across the battlefield. So many men fell attempting to cross open ground that the Russians sometimes despaired of making the final breakthrough. More and more tanks and self-propelled guns were brought forward. Perhaps 10,000 German defenders remained within their perimeter. It seemed so hard to kill men dug into positions of masonry and rubble. Late that evening, at desperate risk two men of 756th Regiment, Mikhail Yegorov and Meliton Kantaria, climbed into the dome of the pitted and blasted Reichstag and hoisted the Red victory banner. In the early hours of 1 May, General Krebs, who had succeeded Guderian as Army Chief of Staff, went forward to the Russian lines and attempted to parley with the commander of Eighth Guards Army, the former defender of Stalingrad, about surrender terms. Absurdly, the German appeared to delude himself that, now Hitler was gone, the Allies would be willing to negotiate with a successor regime. After consultations with Stalin and Zhukov, Krebs was brutally informed that only total capitulation was acceptable. He returned to his headquarters. That evening the Russians launched a devastating new barrage against the remaining German perimeter. Next morning, the commander of LVI Pan-zer Corps requested a ceasefire. At 1500 on the afternoon of 2 May, the Rus-sian guns fell silent. Some 125,000 Berliners had died in the battle. Krebs killed himself.

“The Germans who fought to the last weren’t the old men—they were surrendering in their thousands, generals and soldiers together,” said Major Yury Ryakhovsky. “It was the young ones who went on and on.” In Berlin on 30 April, he was told of a twelve-year-old German boy who had destroyed twelve Soviet tanks with Panzerfausts. “We had never really understood just what the fausts could do. There were piles of them everywhere. Boys were firing at T-34s from a range of two or three metres. You could get nowhere in a straight line—you had to zig-zag everywhere, to and fro across the streets.”

“It seemed so strange, when the end was so close, that these young boys were resisting so fiercely,” said Lieutenant Vasily Filimonenko. When at last it was all over, he watched enemy soldiers advancing nervously from their positions to surrender, crying “
Hitler kaputt! Hitler kaputt!
”—the Wehrmacht’s mantra of renunciation. The Russian officer remembered earlier days, when even in captivity the arrogance of Hitler’s soldiers was undimmed. They would tell their captors sneeringly: “You’re all for it, you know.”

When Yury Ryakhovsky reached the ruins of the Reichstag, he could not bring himself to emulate thousands of Russian soldiers who had already scrawled their names on the walls. “I disliked the idea of behaving like a tourist. We were not there as tourists, I thought.” But when Captain Vasily Krylov saw his cousin Nikolai’s signature among the mass of graffiti, he wrote beneath it: “I was here, too.” Krylov said: “I felt great satisfaction, looking on Berlin. Our vengeance had come. Even when I saw Dresden, I thought: this, also, was right.” Filimonenko cherished the end in Hitler’s capital as the greatest moment of his life: “Ever since 1941, I had always dreamed of surviving to walk into Berlin.” Of a hundred men with whom he had completed his artillery training course in 1940, just three survived to celebrate victory.

Between 16 April and 8 May, the fronts of Zhukov, Konev and Rokossovsky lost 352,425 men, by far the heaviest casualty toll of the battle for Germany.* 
⁹
More than 100,000 of these men were dead. The capture of Berlin displayed outstanding generalship by Konev, not by Zhukov. In his yearning for glory and in his desperation to satisfy Stalin, 1st Belorussian Front’s commander battered the enemy into submission through human sacrifice, not manoeuvre. Stalin and the Red Army gained their symbolic triumph, in a fashion and at a cost that no Western ally could envy. Hitler had desired that his own death should be wreathed in the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of lesser mortals. Zhukov indulged him, making the battle for Berlin a clash of two prehistoric animals, butting and writhing for mastery in a welter of blood, until the lesser beast at last succumbed to its wounds and toppled among the ruins.

A Berlin housewife emerged from her shelter at midday on 2 May, for the first time since 25 April. Firing was still audible in the distance.

It was raining, and felt very cold. Our legs felt very queer, walking in the street. Berlin as far as the eye could see was a smoking, smouldering ruin. Dead men lay on the ground, and the living clambered over them carrying bedding and household articles. We went back to the shelter to fetch our things, and a mother and child from the Ukraine. Her house had gone, and I was going to nurse her at home. At the entrance was a Russian lieutenant. He said: “Now the war is over.” We said: “Thank God.”

The mother of Margrit and Karla Hug, both of whom had been repeatedly raped, took a different view. “Mutti decided she did not want any more humiliation and shame for Karla and me,” Margrit wrote in her diary for 1 May, and took us to the flat where we each drank four cups of Cinzano (after the chemist failed to persuade Mutti that it was not the time to end our lives). I said goodbye to friends and to Franzel, my brother . . . On the roof, we sat at the edge feet dangling down. Our house has six storeys. Mutti sat behind us, saying, “Jump, girls, jump.” I wondered why I did not fall. I wanted to, feeling very drowsy. I saw Vati [her father] standing down below, looking up, shouting: “Don’t do it!” The roof of the next house was burning. Bits of burning tar landed on Karla’s dress. She cried and moved on to a safer place. A neighbour appeared, and persuaded Mutti not to make us jump.

Yet many, many did kill themselves.

“Nothing is left of Berlin but memories,” Lieutenant Gennady Ivanov, one of the more reflective officers in the Red Army, wrote to his parents. “I would never have believed that a great city could be reduced to mere rubble. It seems so strange, after four years of gunfire, now to hear not a single shot around us.” It is impossible to dispute the truth of one of Goebbels’s last pronouncements before the murder of his children and his own suicide alongside his wife: “The earth will shake as we leave the scene.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Bitter End

RETRIBUTION

“
T
HE
G
ERMANY IN
which we found ourselves travelling at the end of April,” wrote the correspondent Alan Moorehead, “presented a scene that was almost beyond human comprehension. Around us fifty great cities lay in ruins . . . Many had no electric light or power or gas or running water, and no coherent system of government. Like ants in an ant-heap the people scurried over the ruins, diving furtively into cellars and doorways in search of loot . . . Everyone was on the move, and there was a frantic ant-like quality about their activities. Life was sordid, aimless, leading nowhere.”

Almost every factory chimney in the greatest industrial society in western Europe stood cold and still. Businesses lay empty, for what business could be done? No trains ran. Refugees huddled in overcrowded ruins, feeding on soup, potatoes and despair. No vessels save Allied warships moved in the ports. The roads were clogged with stony-faced people: soldiers in tattered uniforms or ill-fitting civilian clothes creeping home; families fleeing from the Russians; freed prisoners and slave labourers roaming the landscape in search of freedom, revenge or booty. Thick dust, generated by countless millions of explosive concussions from end to end of Germany, lay upon everything—windows, furniture, vehicles, houses, corpses, living people. The victors observed that a physical pallor of defeat possessed the faces of Germans, a compound of hunger, exhaustion and fear for the future. Among young and old alike, laughter had become a redundant sensation.

The orgy of looting, destruction and rape which followed the Red Army’s triumph in Berlin and across the rest of eastern Germany seemed to Stalin a just recompense to his soldiers for their labour, and a fitting chastisement for the German people. The Imperial Japanese Army had been behaving in similar fashion in China since 1937. Napoleon’s soldiers likewise shamed the name of France during their campaign in Spain a century and a half before. But nothing on the scale of the Soviet terror had been seen in Europe since the seventeenth century. “It was bitter to learn that Goebbels’s propaganda had been factual and accurate,” wrote the Danish journalist Paul von Stemann. “It was not that a sex-starved Russian soldier forced himself upon a girl who took his fancy. It was a destructive, hateful and wholesale act of vengeance. Age or looks were irrelevant. The grandmother was no safer than the granddaughter, the ugly and filthy no more than the fresh and attractive.” Von Stemann protested to a Soviet officer about the rapes he witnessed all around him. “Keep out of this,” the soldier told him sternly. “Just leave it alone. It has nothing to do with you.” Most Russians, then and later, excused what took place. Valentin Krulik shrugged: “People had so much hatred to work off.”

Ursula Siwik, wife of Hans who was once among Hitler’s bodyguard, was raped three times by Russian soldiers in Berlin. Siwik, outraged, said without any hint of irony: “No German soldier would have behaved as they did.” Waltraut Ptack, a thirteen-year-old who had escaped with her mother, brother and sister from East Prussia, was huddled with her family in an abandoned seaside villa in Pomerania when the Red Army came. They heard women screaming in nearby houses, then two Russians kicked open their own door. One spoke German. “
Hitler
kaputt!
” he said. Then he began to harangue the cringing little group about Germany’s crimes in Russia. Waltraut said: “It was so awful having to listen to all this, when we knew that we had done nothing wrong. It wasn’t us who had done these things.” The Russians raped her mother.