The Second World War (84 page)

During the last weeks of March and the first of April Zhukov’s and Konev’s fronts assembled the force and supplies they would need for the assault on the city. Zhukov accumulated 7 million shells to supply his artillery, which was to be massed at a density of 295 guns to each attack kilometre; Konev, who needed to capture assault positions across the river Neisse from which to launch his offensive, had concentrated 120 engineer and thirteen bridging battalions to seize footholds, and 2150 aircraft to cover the operation.

While Zhukov and Konev were preparing for the great assault, Tolbukhin and Malinovsky opened the drive out of central Hungary on Vienna. On 1 April their tank columns began their race northward across the wide Danubian plain, brushing aside German armoured brigades which could put no more than seven to ten tanks in the field. By 6 April Tolbukhin’s spearheads had entered the western and southern suburbs of Vienna and on 8 April there was intense fighting for the city centre. Local SS units fought fanatically, with total disregard for the safety of the monuments they made their strongpoints. Point-blank artillery duels broke out around the buildings of the Ring, there was fierce fighting in the Graben and the Körtnerstrasse in the heart of the old city which had resisted the Turkish siege of 1683, and the Burgtheater and the Opera House were totally burnt out. Miraculously the Hofburg, the Albertina and the Kunsthistorischemuseum survived; but when the survivors of the German garrison eventually dragged themselves northward over the Danube across the Reichsbrücke on 13 April one of the great treasure-houses of European civilisation lay burning and devastated in acres behind them.

In the west too the great cities of the Reich were now falling to Allied attack. Eight armies were aligned along the west bank of the Rhine at the beginning of March, from north to south the Canadian First, Allied First Airborne, British Second, American Ninth, First, Third and Seventh and French First, the last facing the Black Forest on the far bank of the river. Patton’s Third and Patch’s Seventh Armies were still separated from the Rhine by the difficult terrain of the Eifel, but both succeeded in driving deep corridors to the river by 10 March. Eisenhower’s plan for the Rhine crossing consisted of a deliberate assault on a wide front, with the heaviest effort to be made in the north by the Canadian, British and American Ninth and First Armies, aimed at encircling the great industrial region of the Ruhr. The British Second and American Ninth Armies’ operations, codenamed respectively Plunder and Grenade, were vast and spectacular offensives involving large numbers of amphibious craft, massive air and artillery preparations and the dropping of two divisions of the Allied Airborne Army behind the German defences on the east bank of the river. They began on 23 March and were lightly opposed; the Allied Liberation Army now contained eighty-five divisions and numbered 4 million men, while the real strength of the
Westheer
was only twenty-six divisions.

The evolution of Eisenhower’s plan, however, had already been altered by a chance event. On 7 March spearheads of the US 9th Armoured Division, belonging to the First Army, had found an unguarded railway bridge across the Rhine at Remagen below Cologne and had rushed it to establish a bridgehead on the far side. It could not at first be exploited, but on 22 March Patton’s Third Army established another bridgehead by surprise assault near Oppenheim. The German defences of the Rhine were therefore broken at two widely separated places, in the Ruhr and at its confluence with the river Main at Mainz, thus threatening the whole Wehrmacht position in the west with envelopment on a large scale. On 10 March Hitler had relieved Rundstedt of supreme command in the theatre (it was the old warrior’s third and last dismissal) and replaced him with Kesselring, brought from Italy where he had so successfully contained the Anglo-American drive up the peninsula; but a change of commanders could not now deflect the inevitable penetration of Germany’s western provinces by the seven Allied armies. While the British and Canadian armies pressed on into northern Germany, aiming towards Hamburg, the US Ninth and First Armies proceeded with the encirclement of the Ruhr and completed it on 1 April, forcing the surrender of 325,000 German soldiers and driving their commander, Model, to suicide. At the same time Patton’s Third Army was embarking on a headlong thrust into southern Germany which at the beginning of May would have carried it to within thirty miles of both Prague and Vienna.

On the evening of 11 April the US Ninth Army reached the river Elbe, designated the previous year as the demarcation line between the Soviet and Western occupation zones in Germany. At Magdeburg the 2nd Armoured Division seized a bridgehead across the Elbe and next day the 83rd Division established another at Barby; their soldiers believed they were going to Berlin, since the 83rd Division was only fifty miles away after enlarging its bridgehead on 14 April. Word swiftly came down the line, however, that they were misled. Eisenhower was bound by the inter-Allied agreement, according to which his American forces in the central sector would stay where they were, while the British and Canadians continued to clear northern Germany and the southernmost American and French armies overran Bavaria and occupied the territory in which Allied intelligence suggested the Germans might be organising a ‘national redoubt’. The capture of Berlin was to be left exclusively to the Red Army.

It was not, however, to be a simple operation of war, but a race between military rivals. In November 1944 Stalin had promised Zhukov – who as his personal military adviser, senior army staff officer and operational commander was the principal architect of the Red Army’s victories – that he should have the privilege of taking Berlin. Then on 1 April, at a Stavka meeting in Moscow devoted to ensuring that the Soviets and not the Western powers would be the first into the Reich capital, General A.I. Antonov of the General Staff posed the question how the demarcation line between Zhukov’s and Konev’s fronts should be drawn. To exclude Konev from the drive on Berlin would be to make the final operation more difficult than it need be. Stalin listened to the argument and then, drawing a pencil line on the situation map, designated their approach routes to within forty miles of the city. Thereafter, he said, ‘Whoever breaks in first, let him take Berlin.’

The two fronts jumped off across the Oder on 16 April. On Zhukov’s front the honour of leading the assault went to Chuikov’s Eighth Guards Army (formerly the Sixty-Second Army, which had defended Stalingrad), whose soldiers had sworn an oath to fight without thought of retreat in the coming battle. German resistance was particularly strong in their sector, however, and at the end of the day it was Konev’s front which had made greater progress. On 17 April Konev continued to make the faster advance, closing on the Spree, Berlin’s river, and persuaded Stalin by telephone that he was now better placed to open the assault on the city from the south, rather from the direct eastern route on which Zhukov’s armoured columns were labouring against fierce opposition by German anti-tank teams. Zhukov now lost patience with his subordinate commanders and demanded that they lead their formations against the German defences in person; officers who showed themselves ‘incapable of carrying out assignments’ or ‘lack of resolution’ were threatened with instant dismissal. This warning produced a sudden and notable increase in the pace of advance through the Seelow heights. By the evening of 19 April Zhukov’s men had cracked all three lines of defences between the Oder and Berlin and stood ready to assault the city.

Rokossovsky’s Second White Russian Front was now aiding Zhukov’s advance by pressing the German defenders of the lower Oder, where their defences still held, from the north. Zhukov was more concerned by the urgent advance of Konev’s front through Cottbus, on the Spree, to Zossen, the headquarters of OKH, since it threatened to take the capital’s fashionable suburbs from the south. On the evening of 20 April, when Konev ordered his leading army ‘categorically to break into Berlin tonight’, Zhukov brought up the guns of the 6th Breakthrough Artillery Division and began the bombardment of the streets of the capital of the Third Reich.

On 20 April Hitler celebrated his fifty-sixth birthday with bizarre solemnity in the bunker, leaving it briefly to inspect an SS unit of the
Frundsberg
Division and to decorate a squad of Hitler Youth boys, orphans of the Allied bombing raid on Dresden, who were defending the capital. This was to be his last public appearance. His power over the Germans nevertheless remained intact. On 28 March he had dismissed Guderian as chief of staff of the German army and replaced him with General Hans Krebs, once military attaché in Moscow and now installed in the bunker at his side; soon the Führer would dismiss others who had managed to make their way to the bunker to offer their congratulations on his birthday, including Goering, as head of the Luftwaffe, and Himmler, as head of the SS. There would be no lack of Germans willing to carry out these orders; more impressively, there was no lack of Germans, whether or not intimidated by the ‘flying courts martial’ which had begun to hang deserters from lampposts, ready to continue the fight for the Nazi regime. Keitel and Jodl, intimates of every one of his command conferences throughout the war, left the bunker on 22 April to take refuge at Fürstenberg, thirty miles north of Berlin and conveniently close to Ravensbruck concentration camp, where a group of so-called
Prominenten
, well-connected foreign prisoners, were held as hostages. Dönitz, the Grand Admiral, went to Plön, near Kiel on the Baltic, immediately after his last interview with the Führer on 21 April; he had transferred naval headquarters there during March. Speer, chief of war industry, came and went on 23 April; other visitors included Ribbentrop, still his Foreign Minister, his adjutant Julius Schaub, his naval representative Admiral Karl-Jesko von Puttkamer, and his personal physician Dr Theodor Morell, whom many in the inner circle believed had secured his privileged place by dosing Hitler with addictive drugs.

A few others actually overcame great danger to make their way to the bunker, including Goering’s successor as commander of the Luftwaffe, General Robert Ritter von Greim, and the celebrated test pilot, Hanna Reitsch, who succeeded in landing on the East-West Axis in a training aircraft, while outside the bunker the garrison of Berlin kept up a ferocious struggle against the encroaching Russian formations throughout the week beween 22 April, the day on which Hitler definitively announced his refusal to leave – ‘Any man who wants may go! I stay here’ – and his suicide on 30 April.

On the morning of 21 April, Zhukov’s tanks entered the northern suburbs, and the units following them were regrouped for siege warfare: Chuikov, who had fought the Battle of Stalingrad, knew what was necessary. Assault groups were formed from a company of infantry, supported by half a dozen anti-tank guns, a troop of tank or assault guns, a couple of engineer platoons and a flamethrower platoon. According to the theory of siege warfare, assault weapons were used to blast or burn down resistance in the city blocks, into which the infantry then attacked. Overhead the heavy artillery and rocket-launchers threw crushing salvoes to prepare the way for the next stage, house-to-house fighting. Medical teams stood close in the rear; street fighting produces exceptionally heavy casualties, not only from gunshot at short range but also from falls between storeys and the collapse of debris.

On 21 April, Zossen fell into the hands of Konev’s front, its elaborate telephone and teleprinter centre still receiving messages from army units all over what remained of unconquered Germany. The next day Stalin finally delineated the thrust lines for the advance into central Berlin. Konev’s sector was aligned on the Anhalter railway station, a position which ensured that his vanguard would be 150 yards away from the Reichstag and Hitler’s bunker. Zhukov, whose troops were already dug deep into the city’s streets, was to be the ‘conqueror of Berlin’ after all, as Stalin had promised the previous November.

However, German resistance was still stiffening. From his bunker Hitler constantly demanded the whereabouts of the two surviving military formations nearest the city, General Walther Wenck’s Twelfth and General Theodor Busse’s Ninth Armies. Although he railed at their failure to come to his rescue, both were fighting hard from the west and south-east to check or throw back the Soviet advance. Nevertheless by 25 April Konev and Zhukov had succeeded in encircling the city from south and north and were assembling unprecedented force to reduce resistance within it. For the final stage of the assault on the centre, Konev massed artillery at a density of 650 guns to the kilometre, literally almost wheel to wheel, and the Soviet 16th and 18th Air Armies had also been brought up to drive away the remnants of the Luftwaffe still trying to fly munitions into the perimeter, either via Tempelhof, the inner Berlin airport, or on to the great avenue of the East-West Axis (by which Greim and Reitsch made their spectacular arrival and eventual departure) in the city centre.

On 26 April 464,000 Soviet troops, supported by 12,700 guns, 21,000 rocket-launchers and 1500 tanks, ringed the inner city ready to launch the final assault of the siege. The circumstances of the inhabitants were now frightful. Tens of thousands had crowded into the huge concrete ‘flak towers’, impervious to high explosive, which dominated the centre; the rest, almost without exception, had taken to the cellars, where living conditions rapidly became as squalid. Food was running short, so too was water, while the relentless bombardment had interrupted electrical and gas supplies and sewerage; behind the fighting troops, moreover, ranged those of the second echelon, many released prisoners of war with a bitter personal grievance against Germans of any age or sex, who vented their hatred by rape, loot and murder.

By 27 April, when a pall of smoke from burning buildings and the heat of combat rose a thousand feet above Berlin, the area of the city still in German hands had been reduced to a strip some ten miles long and three miles wide, running in an east-west direction. Hitler was demanding the whereabouts of Wenck; but Wenck had failed to break through, as had Busse’s Ninth Army, while the remnants of Manteuffel’s Third Panzer Army were withdrawing to the west. Berlin was now defended by remnants, including shreds of foreign SS units – Balts, and Frenchmen from the Charlemagne Division, as well as Degrelle’s Walloons, whom the chaos of fighting had tossed into the environs of the bunker. On 28 April these last fanatics of the National Socialist revolution found themselves fighting for its government buildings in the Wilhelmstrasse, the Bendlerstrasse and near the Reich Chancellery itself. Professor John Erickson has described the scene: