The German War (91 page)

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On 16 April, at 3.30 a.m., the Soviet heavy guns began their initial bombardment of the German position along the Seelow Heights, the low but steep hills on which the German 9th Army was entrenched above the swampy ground of the Oder valley. Lacking tanks and artillery, reserves and battle-hardened troops, the Germans withstood the initial massive barrage by retreating to their rear lines and leaving the shells to fall into empty trenches. It was a technique Heinrici had used to hold the Dniepr line for seven months in 1943–44. Now it bought him three days. Further south, the Soviets broke through Ferdinand Schörner’s 4th Panzer Army, threatening to encircle Heinrici’s troops. As it too was forced back, giving up the Seelow Heights, the German 9th Army was broken up. Then, on 20 April – Hitler’s birthday and the day so many Germans had been led to believe the Wehrmacht would launch its own counter-offensive – Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front broke through the outer defence ring of the capital. At the same time, the 1st Ukrainian Front under Konev was approaching Berlin from the south.
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While some 85,000 German troops attempted to defend the capital against the 1.5 million Soviet troops converging on it from three sides, in Wilmersdorf the novelist Hertha von Gebhardt and her daughter Renate took their coffee at the bakery on the corner. The owner had donned his SA uniform and medals and was holding forth to his customers, while the ‘sad herds’ of the Volkssturm assembling outside caught Gebhardt’s eye. In her block of flats, there was no gas and the neighbours had all erected shaky stoves on their balconies; bunk beds were being erected in the cellar for all of the twenty people living there. For the next week, Gebhardt would chronicle the transformation of her heterogeneous collection of neighbours into a ‘cellar community’, increasingly cut off from any wider ‘national community’.
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On Sunday 22 April, the shops reopened so that people could stock up between air raids and attacks by dive-bombers. That day the electricity came on again too, allowing them to listen to Mozart’s
Magic Flute
on the radio. The news reported that the fighting had reached the northern suburb of Berlin-Weissensee. Monday brought rumours of workers fighting the SS in the old ‘red’ districts of the city and the men of the neighbourhood took turns to stand watch. Other rumours doing the rounds of the queues outside the shops heralded an imminent armistice and a new German alliance with Britain and America against Russia. Hertha and Renate used the lull in the bombing to eat their noodle soup upstairs at their dining-room table, before taking their coffee again at the local bakery. Soon they had a new worry: the soldiers were moving into their neighbourhood, setting up flak guns, building street barricades and establishing a command post at the street corner. ‘All this, highly unpropitious,’ Gebhardt commented drily. As she calculated their chances of surviving such a defence it suddenly did not seem worth eking out the week’s meat ration, and she and Renate ate half of it for dinner. The 49-year-old novelist felt confident that the older Volkssturm men would throw away their weapons in good time, but she was not so sure about the 14 to 16-year-olds, as she watched them lugging rifles almost as big as they were while their greatcoats trailed on the ground behind them. ‘The Americans don’t seem to be coming. Unbelievable,’ she noted in her diary, seized with gloom.
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The less there was left to defend, the more draconian the orders. Keitel, Bormann and Himmler instructed the military, Party officials and the SS to defend every town to the last man and reject all offers to surrender. Himmler told the SS to shoot all men ‘in a house where a white flag appears’, dropping his earlier reluctance to impose collective reprisals on Germans. In the west, as the Wehrmacht retreated towards first the Main and then the Danube, the fate of each town and village depended on a local constellation: on the military commander, the Nazi leadership, other civic officials and, sometimes, the local population. How the war ended would be decided city by city, town by town, and village by village. In Schwäbisch Gmünd, the Party leader and military commander had two men executed hours before the Americans arrived on 20 April. In nearby Stuttgart, local notables managed to sideline the Gauleiter of Württemberg by persuading the city’s mayor to negotiate secretly with the Wehrmacht commanders and so ensure a peaceful handover. In Bad Windsheim in Lower Franconia, the population itself took the initiative. Between 200 and 300 women came out to demonstrate, some with their children, until the local commandant gave in and agreed not to defend the town – but not before a Gestapo unit from Nuremberg had executed one of the women as a ringleader.
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Much of the terror that engulfed Swabia, Bavaria and Baden in these final weeks came not from local Nazis, but from the sudden arrival of units like Max Simon’s 13th SS Army Corps, as they pulled back to the Danube and then to Munich, and the ‘flying court martials’ conducted by Major Erwin Helms, who patrolled the south in a grey Mercedes looking for deserters. In the village of Zellingen, Helms had a 60-year-old farmer and Volkssturm member hanged from his own pear tree simply for making disparaging remarks about further military defence. In the village of Brettheim, Simon executed three inhabitants, including the local Nazi Party leader and mayor, and posted placards threatening retaliation against the families of anyone guilty of defeatism.
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In Unterbernbach, Victor Klemperer had also heard the rumour that the German counter-offensive would start on 20 April. The following day, after it had failed to materialise, an elderly Volkssturm man insisted that military strategy ‘could not be grasped with a “slide rule” and with “common sense”: that was no use at all – one simply had to “believe in the Führer and in victory”! I was really rather depressed by these speeches,’ Klemperer added. He noted too that Germany now ‘basically consists of no more than a generously defined Greater Berlin and a part of Bavaria’. By 22 April, even the old Nazi Flammensbeck lost heart as he read Goebbels’s article for Hitler’s birthday. Discussing the piece around the kitchen table, Klemperer was struck by the change in the farmer’s outlook: ‘New weapon, offensive, turning-point – he had believed it all, but “now he didn’t believe in anything any more”. Peace must be made, the present government must go. Did I think we would all be deported?’
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Meanwhile the wheels of ordinary administration continued to turn. Although the Bavarian Finance Ministry had resorted to printing banknotes itself, salaries were paid on time for all public sector employees, from army generals to the office cleaning staff in the Munich police department. On 23 April, Bayern Munich beat TSV 1860 in a football derby by three goals to two. Despite the regime of terror that gripped Bavaria in April 1945, people went on expressing opinions for and against the war. As the front approached each town and village, it became increasingly clear that the immediate threat now came from German not American soldiers. When part of a Hitler Youth division arrived in Unterbernbach, Klemperer could not decide if they looked more like marauders from the Thirty Years War or the Children’s Crusade. On 23 April, Regensburg was surrendered and the Americans pushed on south of the Danube towards Augsburg. On 27 April, an old man from Tyrol asked Victor Klemperer ‘whether the Americans and Russians will fight when they meet’. It was the final legacy, Klemperer thought, of Goebbels’s efforts to encourage belief that Germany might be rescued by the Americans; as yet, no one in Unterbernbach knew that the Russians and Americans had met near Torgau on the Elbe two days earlier.
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As the sixth day of battle for Berlin broke on 25 April, Hertha von Gebhardt heard that, just to the south of Wilmersdorf, the station at Steglitz had been taken. She was gripped by fear: what would happen if someone foolishly decided to defend their block of flats? Could she trust all her ‘house community’ not to try? A neighbour returned having seen five women lying in the street with their shopping bags beside them, their bodies ripped open by shrapnel. The news from Steglitz was more encouraging: they heard that the Russians were being ‘very friendly to the civilian population’. In an attempt to reverse the reputation they had earned in East Prussia and Silesia, the Red Army was sending civilians and even German prisoners of war back across the lines to assure Berliners that they would be treated well. In the meantime, the Wilmersdorf shops were open and selling off their remaining stock while they could: men’s underwear, long scarce, was suddenly available.

That night, fifteen bombs and shells hit their block. The small ‘house community’ slept fitfully as they waited for the attack, and Gebhardt roused them at 6 a.m., just before the Katiusha rockets opened up. She persuaded her neighbours to move into the adjacent cellar, where they would be safer. At midday they divided up all the schnapps and tobacco they had left and then searched the flats for weapons, uniforms, Nazi insignia and military maps, anything that might provoke the Russians. The ‘house community’ also suffered its first casualties. A man and a 19-year-old girl were hit by shrapnel as they tried to make it back inside from queuing for water at the street corner. Two nurses and a woman dentist came from neighbouring houses to tend them, before they took them to the nearest hospital. The girl was operated on and saved, while the man bled to death in the hospital corridor. Late in the evening as they sat in the cellar of the neighbouring house someone mentioned to Hertha that the bomb which had injured them had also destroyed their apartment building. It did not seem to matter any more – or not yet. All she could find to say was, ‘So?’
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At 5 a.m. on Friday 27 April, Hertha von Gebhardt heard the crump of tank shells nearby. The men went upstairs to ply the Volkssturm soldiers posted in the entrance to the building with schnapps and talk them into leaving. They took the schnapps but moved on reluctantly. While many of the older men destroyed their militia armbands and paybooks, threw away their weapons and equipment and went home, those along the Teltow Canal made a stand. Further to the west, the Hitler Youth battalions continued to defend the Pichelsdorf and Charlotte bridges over the Havel. Elsewhere in Berlin, looting was under way, as soldiers, civilians and Volkssturm men elbowed each other aside to empty shops and warehouses before the Soviets arrived. In the cellars of Kleiststrasse, they stood up to their ankles in drink, pouring wine and spirits into the dirty buckets they had brought with them. By the end of that day Berlin was completely surrounded, cut off from the archipelago of territories which now constituted the ‘Reich’.
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In Wilmersdorf the stillness that afternoon was broken by rifle shots ricocheting in the street outside the Gebhardts’ building. ‘The Russians are there,’ the neighbours whispered to one another in the cellar. Women who had been quarrelling earlier now kissed and hugged. Even a neighbour who had not spoken to Gebhardt for weeks now came over and offered her a cigarette, as the moment they had all dreaded for so long finally arrived. Everyone rummaged in their bags to find white material – towels, napkins, handkerchiefs. Then a single Russian soldier entered their cellar. He calmly asked in German about soldiers and weapons and then left. As the fighting moved on to the Fehrberliner Platz, some of the women ventured out to fetch water from the pump outside the bakery. For Hertha von Gebhardt and the ‘house community’ of 8 Geroldstrasse the war ended that Friday afternoon.
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When Adolf Hitler committed suicide on 30 April, there was little left to defend in Berlin. While sailors, Hitler Youths and SS units fought on in the Reichstag building and held the Zoo bunker, Goebbels initiated the first negotiations with the victor of Stalingrad, Vasily Chuikov, to surrender the German capital. By a quirk of fate, that same day American troops entered Hitler’s private flat on the Prinzregentenplatz in Munich; during the previous week, the headline of the
Völkischer Beobachter
had still been proclaiming ‘Fortress Bavaria’ and ‘Germany stands firm and loyal to the Führer’.
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On 29 April, as the US 45th ‘Thunderbird’ Division had approached Munich from the north-west, it reached Dachau, the centre of a major SS training facility and stores and Himmler’s first, ‘model’ concentration camp. Outside the camp the troops came upon an abandoned train of forty cattle trucks loaded with 2,000 prisoners evacuated from the concentration camp at Buchenwald. Those who had made it out of the doors had been shot by the SS; inside the trucks only seventeen people showed any signs of life. Dachau had become the final destination for the death marches from camp to camp. Among the dying and the dead the Americans found 32,000 survivors. Appalled and enraged by what they saw on entering the camp, some of the US soldiers simply gunned down the SS guards or shot them in the legs and let the prisoners finish them off.

On the first evening of their liberation, prisoners took Colonel Bill Walsh on a tour of the camp. He was shown the kennels of the bloodhounds, the interior of one of the dark, overcrowded and infested barracks, the corpses lying in rows outside the sick bay, and finally the thousands of corpses neatly stacked to over two metres high like firewood around the crematorium, its ovens full of ash. Nothing had prepared the American soldiers for these sights. In the next few days, as local residents pushed their bicycles down the camp road to collect loot from the SS warehouses, US soldiers were astonished to see them passing the goods train with its freight of dead with no apparent concern.
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Berlin capitulated on the night of 1–2 May. Here too local residents spent their first day of peace plundering the remaining shops and military depots. The SS had set fire to their central stores in the Schultheiss Brewery in the Prenzlauerberg district during the fighting, but now it was overrun with civilians eager to salvage what was left and put something by for the starvation conditions they expected defeat to bring. Children who witnessed the turmoil and sudden violence were shocked. Outside the water tower in the Prenzlauerberg district, one 12-year-old watched as the looters were robbed by other civilians who fell on them ‘like hyenas’. Another boy felt ashamed when he saw Red Army soldiers taking pictures of the fighting crowds: ‘Germany’s conquerors did not get a good impression,’ he observed.
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