The Second World War (85 page)

The
Tiergarten
, Berlin’s famous zoo, was a nightmare of flapping, screeching birds and broken, battered animals. The ‘cellar tribes’ who dominated the life of the city crept and crawled about, but adding to the horror of these tribalised communities clinging to life, sharing a little warmth and desperately improvised feeding, when the shelling stopped and the assault troops rolled through the houses and across the squares, there followed a brute, drunken, capricious mob of rapists and ignorant plunderers. . . . Where the Russians did not as yet rampage, the SS hunted down deserters and lynching commands hanged simple soldiers on the orders of young, hawk-faced officers who brooked no resistance or excuse.

On the same day the German defenders of the central area around the Reich Chancellery and the Reichstag tried to hold off the northern Russian thrust into this ‘citadel’, as it had been designated, by blowing the Moltke bridge over the river Spree. The demolition damaged but did not destroy it, and it was rushed early next morning under cover of darkness. There then followed a fierce battle for the Ministry of the Interior building ‘Himmler’s house’, as the Russians dubbed it – and shortly afterwards for the Reichstag. Early on 29 April the fighting was less than a quarter of a mile from the Reich Chancellery, which was being demolished by heavy Russian shells, while 55 feet beneath the surface of the cratered garden Hitler was enacting the last decisions of his life. He spent the first part of the day dictating his ‘political testament’, enjoining the continuation of the struggle against Bolshevism and Jewry, and he then entrusted copies of this to reliable subordinates who were ordered to smuggle them through the fighting lines to OKW headquarters, to Field Marshal Schörner and to Grand Admiral Dönitz. By separate acts he appointed Schörner to succeed him as commander-in-chief of the German army and Dönitz as head of state. Doónitz’s headquarters at Ploón thus became the Reich’s temporary seat of government, and he would remain there until 2 May, when he transferred to the naval academy at Mürwik, near Flensburg, in Schleswig-Holstein. Hitler also dismissed Speer, for recently revealed acts of insubordination in refusing to carry out a ‘scorched earth’ policy, and expelled Goering and Himmler from the Nazi Party, the former for daring to anticipate his promised succession to Hitler’s place, the latter for having made unauthorised peace approaches to the Western Allies. He had already appointed Ritter von Greim commander of the Luftwaffe and specified eighteen other military and political appointments to Dönitz in the political testament. He also married Eva Braun, who had arrived in the bunker on 15 April, in a civil ceremony performed by a Berlin municipal official hastily recalled from his
Volkssturm
unit defending the ‘citadel’.

Hitler had not slept during the night of 28/29 April and retired to his private quarters until the afternoon of 29 April. He attended the evening conference, which began at ten o’clock, but the meeting was a formality, since the balloon which supported the bunker’s radio transmitting aerial had been shot down that morning and the telephone switchboard no longer communicated with the outside world. General Karl Weidling, the ‘fortress’ commander of Berlin, warned that the Russians would certainly break through to the Chancellery by 1 May, and urged that the troops remaining in action be ordered to break out of Berlin. Hitler dismissed the possibility. It was clear that he was committed to his own end.

During the night of 29/30 April he took his farewells first from the women – secretaries, nurses, cooks – who had continued to attend him in the last weeks, then from the men – adjutants, party functionaries and officials. He slept briefly in the early morning of 30 April, attended his last situation conference, at which the SS commandant of the Chancellery, Wilhelm Mohnke, reported the progress of the fighting around the building, and then adjourned for lunch with his two favourite secretaries, Gerda Christian and Traudl Junge, who had spent the long months with him at Rastenburg and Vinnitsa. They ate noodles and salad and talked sporadically about dogs; Hitler had just had his cherished Alsatian bitch, Blondi, and four pups destroyed with the poison he intended to use himself, and inspected the corpses to assure himself that it worked. Eva Braun, now Frau Hitler, remained in her quarters; then about three o’clock she emerged to join Hitler in shaking hands with Bormann, Goebbels and the other senior members of the entourage who remained in the bunker. Hitler then retired with her into the private quarters – where Frau Goebbels made a brief and hysterical irruption to plead that he escape to Berchtesgaden – and after a few minutes, measured by the funeral party which waited outside, together they took cyanide. Hitler simultaneously shot himself with a service pistol.

An hour earlier soldiers of Zhukov’s front, belonging to the 1st Battalion, 756th Rifle Regiment, 150th Division of the Third Shock Army, had planted one of the nine Red Victory Banners (previously distributed to the army by its military soviet) on the second floor of the Reichstag, chosen as the point whose capture would symbolise the end of the siege of Berlin. The building had just been brought under direct fire by eighty-nine heavy Russian guns of 152 mm and 203 mm; but its German garrison was still intact and fighting. Combat within the building raged all afternoon and evening until at a little after ten o’clock a final assault allowed two Red Army men of the 1st Battalion of the 756th Regiment, Mikhail Yegorov and Meliton Kantaria, to hoist their Red Victory Banner on the Reichstag’s dome.

The bodies of Hitler and his wife had by then been incinerated by the funeral party in a shell crater in the Chancellery garden. Once the flames, kindled with petrol brought from the Chancellery garage, had died down the remains of the bodies were buried in another shell crater nearby (from which they were to be disinterred by the Russians on 5 May). Shells were falling in the garden and in the Chancellery area, and fighting was raging in all the government buildings in the ‘citadel’. Goebbels, appointed Reich Chancellor at the same time as Hitler nominated Dönitz to succeed him as head of state, nevertheless felt it important to make contact with the Russians to arrange a truce so that preparations could be made for peace talks, which, in the deluded atmosphere prevailing in the bunker, he believed were possible. Late in the evening of 30 April a colonel was sent as emissary to the nearest Russian headquarters, and early on the morning of 1 May General Krebs, since 28 March the army chief of staff, but formerly military attaché in Moscow (at the time of Barbarossa) and a Russian-speaker, went forward through the burning ruins to treat with the senior Soviet officer present. It was Chuikov, now the commander of the Eighth Guards Army, but who two years earlier had commanded the Russian defenders in the siege of Stalingrad.

A strange four-sided conversation developed. Chuikov heard Krebs out and was then connected by telephone to Zhukov, who in turn spoke to Stalin in Moscow. ‘Chuikov reporting,’ the general said. ‘General of Infantry Krebs is here. He has been authorised by the German authorities to hold talks with us. He states that Hitler ended his life by suicide. I ask you to inform Comrade Stalin that power is now in the hands of Goebbels, Bormann and Admiral Dönitz. . . . Krebs suggests a cessation of military operations at once.’ Krebs, however, like Bormann and Goebbels, remained deluded by the belief that the Allies would be ready to treat with Hitler’s successors as if they were legitimate inheritors of the authority of a sovereign government. Stalin tired quickly of the conversation, declared abruptly that the only terms were unconditional surrender and went to bed. Zhukov persisted a little longer but then announced that he was sending his deputy, General Sokolovsky, and broke off communication. Sokolovsky and Chuikov between them engaged in interminable parleys with Krebs, who had difficulty in establishing his credentials, so murky were recent developments in the bunker (with which he communicated twice by runner). Eventually Chuikov’s patience ran out. In the early afternoon of 1 May he told Krebs that the new government’s powers were limited to ‘the possibility of announcing that Hitler is dead, that Himmler is a traitor and to treat with three governments – USSR, USA and England – on
complete capitulation
’. To his own forces Chuikov sent the order: ‘Pour on the shells . . . no more talks. Storm the place.’ At 6.30 pm on 1 May every Soviet gun and rocket-launcher in Berlin opened fire on the unsubdued area. The eruption was signal enough to those remaining in the bunker that hopes of arranging a succession were illusory. About two hours later Goebbels and his wife – who had just killed her own six children by the administration of poison – committed suicide in the Chancellery garden close to Hitler’s grave. Their bodies were more perfunctorily cremated and buried nearby. The rest of the bunker party, underlings as well as grandees like Bormann, now organised themselves into escape parties and made their way through the burning ruins towards what they hoped was safety in the outer suburbs. Meanwhile the Soviet troops – understandably reluctant to risk casualties in what were clearly the last minutes of the siege of Berlin – pressed inward behind continuous salvoes of artillery fire. Early on the morning of 2 May LVI Panzer Corps transmitted a request for a cease-fire. At 6 am Weidling, the commandant of the Berlin ‘fortress’, surrendered to the Russians and was brought to Chuikov’s headquarters, where he dictated the capitulation signal: ‘On 30 April 1945 the Führer took his own life and thus it is that we who remain – having sworn him an oath of loyalty – are left alone. According to the Führer’s orders, you, German soldiers, were to fight on for Berlin, in spite of the fact that ammunition had run out and in spite of the general situation, which makes further resistance on our part senseless. My orders are: to cease resistance forthwith.’

In John Erickson’s words: ‘At 3 pm on the afternoon of 2 May Soviet guns ceased to fire on Berlin. A great enveloping silence fell. Soviet troops cheered and shouted, breaking out the food and drink. Along what had once been Hitler’s parade route, columns of Soviet tanks were drawn up as for inspection, the crews jumping from their machines to embrace all and sundry at this new-found cease-fire.’ The peace which surrounded them was one of the tomb. About 125,000 Berliners had died in the siege, a significant number by suicide; the suicides included Krebs and numbers of others in the bunker party. Yet probably tens of thousand of others died in the great migration of Germans from east to west in April, when 8 million left their homes in Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia to seek refuge from the Red Army in the Anglo-American occupation zones. By one of the most bizarre lapses of security in the entire war, the demarcation line agreed between Moscow, London and Washington had become known to the Germans during 1944, and the last fight of the Wehrmacht in the west was motivated by the urge to hold open the line of retreat across the Elbe to the last possible moment. Civilians too seem to have learned where safety lay and to have pressed on ahead of the Red Army to reach it – but at terrible cost.

The cost to the Red Army of its victory in the siege of Berlin had also been terrible. Between 16 April and 8 May, Zhukov, Konev and Rokossovsky’s fronts had lost 304,887 men killed, wounded and missing, 10 per cent of their strength and the heaviest casualty list suffered by the Red Army in any battle of the war (with the exception of the captive toll of the great encirclement battles of 1941). Moreover, the last sieges of the cities of the Reich were not yet over. Breslau held out until 6 May, its siege having cost the Russians 60,000 killed and wounded; in Prague, capital of the ‘Reich Protectorate’, the Czech National Army resistance group staged an uprising in which the puppet German ‘Vlasov army’ changed sides and skirmished against the SS garrison in the hope of delivering the city to the Americans – a vain hope, for which Vlasov’s men paid a terrible price in blood when the Red Army entered it on 9 May.

By then, however, the war in what remained of Hitler’s empire was almost everywhere over. A local armistice had been arranged in Italy, through the SS General Karl Wolff, on 29 April, scheduled for announcement on 2 May. On 3 May Admiral Hans von Friedeburg surrendered the German forces in Denmark, Holland and North Germany to Montgomery. On 7 May Jodl, dispatched by Dönitz from his makeshift seat of government at Flensburg in Schleswig-Holstein, signed a general surrender of German forces at Eisenhower’s headquarters at Reims in France. It was confirmed at an inter-Allied meeting in Berlin on 10 May. Norway, which the Russians had fractionally penetrated only at the very north of the country from Finland in October 1944, was surrendered by its intact German garrison on 8 May. The Courland pocket capitulated on 9 May. Dunkirk, La Pallice, La Rochelle and Rochefort, the last of the ‘Führer fortresses’ in western Europe, surrendered on 9 May, as did the Channel Islands, Lorient and Saint-Nazaire on 10 May. The final surrender of the war in the West was at Heligoland on 11 May.

Peace brought no rest to the human flotsam of the war, which swirled in hordes between and behind the victorious armies. Ten million Wehrmacht prisoners, 8 million German refugees, 3 million Balkan fugitives, 2 million Russian prisoners of war, slave and forced labourers by the millions – and also the raw material of the ‘displaced person’ tragedy which was to haunt Europe for a decade after the war – washed about the battlefield. In Britain and America crowds thronged the streets on 8 May to celebrate ‘VE Day’; in the Europe to which their soldiers had brought victory, the vanquished and their victims scratched for food and shelter in the ruins the war had wrought.