Five Days That Shocked the World: Eyewitness Accounts from Europe at the End of World War II (10 page)

The Reichstag stood on the banks of the river Spree. The Russians had crossed the river during the night, forcing their way over the Moltke Bridge, five hundred yards to the west. The fighting had been long and bloody, with heavy casualties on both sides, but the Russians had managed to establish a bridgehead on the German bank by early morning. As the sky began to lighten, they held one side of the street leading to the open ground in front of the Reichstag. The Germans held the other. The fighting remained relentless, with no quarter given and none expected as they grappled with one another from house to house and building to building across the street.

The German defense was savage. Many of the defenders were SS, hard-faced young fanatics who had come up through the Hitler Youth and had never known anything except Nazism in their young lives. They thought nothing of storming into any building displaying a white flag and massacring the occupants. They hanged cowards from lampposts and shot deserters out of hand. They fought with the courage of young men who were not afraid to die, who had been taught no higher calling in the service of Führer and Fatherland. As the German defenders saw it, they were fighting to hold the Russians back until Wenck’s army arrived, and with him, the Americans, who were racing to Berlin to protect the capital and save German culture from the Red Menace. It was simply a question of hanging on until help arrived from the west.

The Russian attack was equally determined. The Russian generals were in a barely concealed competition to be the first to reach the Reichstag. Whoever commanded the unit that captured the building and raised the red flag over the city would be a hero of the Soviet Union for the rest of his life. Habitually cavalier with the lives of their men, the Russian generals didn’t seem to care how many were killed as they drove them forward toward the gaunt, gray building that now stood in plain view of them, only a few hundred yards away along the street.

But ordinary Russian soldiers were increasingly reluctant to die this close to the end of the war. So many had been killed in the past few days that their numbers had had to be made up with prisoners of war newly released from German camps. Instead of going home, the prisoners had been sent straight to the front line with guns in their hands, given a chance to atone in battle for the shame of having been taken prisoner. Some welcomed the opportunity for another crack at the Germans after all they had suffered in prison camp. Most wanted no further part in the fighting. Their ranks had been stiffened by hard-line Komsomol and Communist Party members, the Bolshevik equivalent of the SS, tough young men who brooked no resistance and insisted on carrying the war to the enemy. To the watching Germans, it sometimes seemed as if the Russians killed as many of their own men, with friendly fire, as they did the enemy.

The battle for the Reichstag began at half past eight that morning, with a preliminary bombardment to soften the defenses for the ensuing attack. The bombardment was massive: all the field artillery, rocket launchers, tanks, and self-propelled guns that the Russians could bring to bear on the Parliament building. It lasted for an hour and a half, after which the Russians intended to begin their assault against the dazed defenders.

As the fighting continued, however, it quickly became clear that the assault would have to be postponed, perhaps for the rest of the day, because the buildings along the way were still being held by the enemy. The Ministry of the Interior, a massive office complex beside the river, was defended in strength by Germans who stubbornly refused to surrender. The Russians were forced to take the building floor by floor and staircase by staircase, clearing each room of the enemy before advancing cautiously to the next. Progress was so slow that it would be evening, at the earliest, before they could turn their attention to the Reichstag, far too late to launch an assault that day.

But the assault had to come next morning, the generals knew, because next morning was the last day of April. No matter how many people were killed in the process, the Russian commanders were determined to see the red flag flying over the Reichstag by nightfall on the last day of April. The timing was vital. Any later and Joseph Stalin wouldn’t be able to claim the credit for it when he took the salute from the Kremlin at the following morning’s May Day parade in Moscow.

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ACROSS THE REST OF BERLIN
it was the same story, the Russians closing in on all sides while the Germans struggled to hold them back. There was no fixed front line as the battle raged to and fro. Berlin’s canals formed a natural barrier, but the Russians were advancing underneath them, along the U-Bahn lines, to attack the Germans in the rear. The Germans were doing the same, which led to clashes in pitch darkness as the two sides fought it out in train tunnels far beneath the earth.

Helmut Altner had spent much of the previous day underground, stepping nervously forward with the rest of his patrol along one tunnel after another. They were attacked by their own people at one point, shot at by Hitler Youth and Waffen-SS as they arrived at a U-Bahn station. Four men had been killed or wounded before the defenders realized their mistake. The two patrols had then joined forces in an attempt to force a passage past the enemy. Fighting had been furious as the Russians fired at them from an adjacent tunnel, bullets flying in all directions as both sides opened up with Panzerfausts and machine guns. Altner had lost all sense of time as he stumbled for hour after hour through the blackness, often crawling forward on all fours in a desperate attempt to avoid being hit and dying unnoticed in the dark.

He had been enormously relieved when they emerged at last into the open air, parading for roll call in the ticket hall of a U-Bahn station. He had had enough of fighting underground. If he was going to be killed, he would far prefer it to happen in the open air rather than down a tunnel, like a rat in a drainpipe.

Altner had spent the rest of the night creeping through the no-man’s-land west of the Zoological Gardens, trailing after the man in front as they advanced through the rubble, expecting to be attacked at any moment. They had come under fire once or twice, but had pressed on regardless, heading back to their base at Ruhleben. They had passed a lost child at one stage, crying in the darkness as it called for its mother. They had seen two men furtively cutting the flesh from a dead horse still harnessed to a wagon, and had stepped over dead soldiers from both sides: a Hitler Youth with his head smashed to a pulp, a Russian woman in a brown uniform, her hair in disarray as she lay beside a burned-out tank. Mostly, however, the streets had been deserted as they passed, the barricades abandoned and the buildings empty on either side. Everything had been eerily quiet in their immediate vicinity, while the din of battle continued unabated elsewhere.

As dawn approached, and the Russians prepared for their attack on the Reichstag, Altner found himself back at Ruhleben, looking forward to some sleep at last after more than twenty-four hours on his feet. The place was full of rumors as he searched for somewhere to lie down. Some Germans still had faith in Wenck’s relieving army; others had heard of a new secret weapon that could yet turn the war in their favor: a gas or a bomb or something that could be launched against America with a destructive power never seen before. Altner himself had heard a story earlier that seemed even more unlikely. It was about the Führer in his bunker:

One soldier says that Hitler got married in the bunker under the Reich Chancellery yesterday. A latrine rumour? That would have been a jolly wedding night under the thunder of the guns! And we still have to go on fighting for this man, to whom Germany no longer belongs! Because of the oath we swore to him, soldiers and civilians have to go on dying. Someone says that Hitler has married an actress and that she will appear as a milkmaid on the new twenty mark note.
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Too exhausted to care much, Altner didn’t know what to make of the rumor:

Depression has set in. Most people do not want to believe it, and even I find it unbelievable. I think that, as a result of the shock of the news of Hitler’s marriage, many of them have started thinking for themselves. Someone says that, once the capital has fallen, he is to be flown out with the whole government from Ruhleben to Brazil to continue the fight from there, in any case as far as possible from the firing, so as to be out of immediate danger. A soldier claims to have seen Hitler climb into an armoured personnel carrier on the 27th, demanding to be taken to the scene of the fighting in the Tiergarten. However, I think this just another fairy story, like so many others.
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WHILE ALTNER SEARCHED
for a place to sleep, Hildegard Knef and Ewald von Demandowsky were thinking of following Hitler’s example and getting married. In the freight yard at Schmargendorf, under sniper fire so intense that a water container had just been shot out of Knef’s hands, Demandowsky had asked her to be his wife. He wanted to marry her while they still had the chance, before one or the other of them was killed in the fighting.

Knef could think of several objections to getting married, not least that Demandowsky already had a wife. But he argued that no one knew that at Schmargendorf. He saw no reason why the lieutenant shouldn’t marry the two of them at once, like the captain on a ship.

They were still discussing it when they heard a rumble from the tennis courts. Peering out of their shed, they saw a tank weaving through the craters, flattening bushes, fences, and anything else that stood in its way. Looking closer, they were very relieved to see that the tank was German.

“That’s the relief force,” Demandowsky shouted to Knef. “I knew it. I knew it. I always told you they wouldn’t let us down.”

As he spoke, a small boy in a Hitler Youth jacket sprinted past them toward the tank. The boy was carrying a Panzerfaust. Before anyone could stop him, he fired it and the tank disappeared in a sheet of flame.

The blast knocked everyone off their feet. Covered in blood, the lieutenant was the first to pick himself up. Rising groggily to his feet, he began to curse the Hitler Youth furiously. Demandowsky chose that moment to announce his wedding plans.

“We want to get married,” he told the lieutenant. “We’d like you to marry us.”

Still dazed, the lieutenant stood stock-still in the glare of the burning tank. With so much else on his mind, he could hardly believe what he was hearing.

“I don’t have the authority,” he snapped at Demandowsky after a moment. He was about to say more when he took a sniper’s bullet full in the face. Knef watched in horror as the lieutenant slumped wordlessly to the ground, his face a bloody mess, just a lump of red meat under his helmet where his features had been.

Knef didn’t linger. She and Demandowsky ran for cover at once, zigzagging hastily across the freight yard while bullets flew all around them. Some soldiers gave them covering fire as they sprinted for the embankment and were pulled up over a wall. Knef was glad to see that these were real soldiers, not old men or Hitler Youths or SS. There were fifteen or twenty of them and they clearly knew their business.

The Russians attacked later, giving their usual screech as they charged across the freight yard. Crouching down, the Germans held their fire until the last possible moment, Knef gripping the ammunition belt while Demandowsky aimed the machine gun. They managed to beat the Russians off, but they knew it would be only a matter of time before they tried again. The Germans retreated as soon as night fell, quietly abandoning their position and slipping back through the ruins toward Hohenzollerndamm under cover of darkness.

They found a cellar full of civilians and tried to join them, hoping for some shelter from the constant fire in the streets. The civilians were mostly women and children, sitting on kitchen chairs around a single candle stub, waiting passively for the Russians to arrive. They weren’t pleased to see Knef and the others.

“Go away!” they yelled. “We don’t want any soldiers here. They’ll kill us if they find you here. Go away!”

“We just need some water,” said one of the soldiers.

“Have a heart.” A fat woman was indignant. “We’ve got children here.”

Another woman, a toothless old hag, took pity on them. Emerging from a corner, she shoved a bottle of water into the soldier’s hands. “God have mercy on us,” she mumbled, as she turned away. Like everyone else in the room, she was under no illusions about what was going to happen when the Russians arrived.

They all seemed mad to Knef, like sheep in a slaughterhouse patiently waiting to be killed. Leaving them to it, she was glad to rejoin the others outside. The whole street appeared to be in flames as she emerged. There was no more talk of marriage as she and Demandowsky linked up with some other soldiers and set off at a run for Hohenzollerndamm, where they had orders to dig in at the cemetery and be ready to hold the Russians again when they attacked at dawn.

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THE WOMEN IN THE CELLAR
were quite right to fear the Russians. Thousands of women were being raped every day as the fight for Berlin intensified. It was often the first thing the Russians did when they arrived, after disarming everyone and pocketing their wristwatches.

Some said that the front line troops were well disciplined and that it was the ones who came after who could not be trusted. Others, that the rapists were recently liberated prisoners of war or soldiers avenging similar assaults on their own womenfolk during the German advance. Whatever their motives, the result was always the same for the women. Young and old alike, they were all in danger as the Russians advanced. Some were raped again and again, so often that they lost count after a while. Others were assaulted so brutally that they couldn’t walk afterward and could only crawl away, hoping not to be attacked further. After all they had endured on the Eastern Front, the Russian army was not inclined to show any mercy to the German women of Berlin.

Ursula Köster was hiding in a Zehlendorf cellar with her parents and three children when the Russians came for her. She was raped by four soldiers that night and another two the next morning. Staggering outside afterward, she found an upturned bathtub lying in the rubble of the communal gardens. She crawled underneath it and hid there with her six-year-old twins and her seven-month-old son.