Armageddon (93 page)

The gauleiter, Karl Hanke, was among the most repellent officials of the Third Reich. He hanged Breslau’s burgomaster for suggesting that the city was indefensible. He sent exuberant daily reports to Berlin, prompting Goebbels to remark in delight: “If all our gauleiters in the east were like this . . . we should be in better shape than we are.” Hitler described Hanke admiringly as “a devil of a fellow.” Yet Hanke’s interventions in the military conduct of the defence were disastrous. He pressed constantly for a breakout to reach Schörner’s army, a notion which the army’s commandant dismissed. Such an initiative would have required several divisions. Thousands of Breslau men and women were forced to work almost to death, building a new airstrip at Hanke’s bidding.

The gauleiter established his own headquarters in the cellars beneath the city’s university library. He proposed to demolish the building above, to render his own quarters impregnable beneath its rubble, and was dissuaded from incinerating half a million books only by fears that the pyre would spread flames across the city. By 1 April, the Russians were bombarding Breslau with huge guns of up to 280mm calibre. The cathedral tower fell, the botanical garden burned, and large areas of the south and west became uninhabitable. Yard by yard, the Russians pushed back the defenders into the city centre.

Everywhere along the Eastern Front, Germany’s forces were cut off, or disintegrating as they fell back to the last bastions of the Reich. When survivors of 10th SS Panzer were refused permission to break out of encirclement on 19 April, “we saw it as our death sentence,” said Captain Karl Godau, a gunner. He still had his battery, but no fuel to move it. Command and control had broken down. On the 20th, they fired off the last of their ammunition, then blew up the guns and trucks within sight of the Russians: “It was horrible—like being stripped naked.” A few men escaped. Godau’s battalion commander, a much admired officer named Harry Jops, swam the Elbe to escape imprisonment. The remainder surrendered. To their surprise, at first the Russians treated them quite well. It was later, during the long march to imprisonment in Silesia and afterwards in Russia, that their descent to misery took place, with stragglers shot down and many men perishing of starvation or despair.

Germany’s armies were crumbling one by one. In the west, resistance had almost ceased. In the east, men manned their positions conscious that to hope even for personal survival was extravagant. Fanatical Nazis aspired only to make an end in keeping with their demented, heroic vision of the Third Reich. Yet every other foothold of German resistance paled into insignificance alongside Hitler’s capital. It was there, the world knew, that the last terrible melodrama must be played out. All eyes now turned upon the grimy, battered, desperate streets of Berlin.

“HITLER KAPUTT! HITLER KAPUTT!”

I
T IS IN
the nature of war that many people find it impossible to acknowledge that the horrors they witness represent reality, or that a familiar environment is doomed. How can the heart accept the signals of the brain, however powerful and rational, that a known universe, in which the blotter stands where it has always stood on the office desk, the sofa in the lounge of the house, the shop on the corner of the street, is about to disappear for ever? If this phenomenon is true for ordinary mortals, then it becomes unsurprising that the Nazi leadership, with the notable exception of Speer, retreated into fantasy even as the Allied armies closed in for the kill. A regime that had suborned a nation and sought to conquer the world sustained its giant edifice of self-delusion to the last. Grand-Admiral Karl Dönitz had directed Germany’s campaign in the Atlantic with some skill if no imagination. Now, with mindless devotion to the cause he had slavishly served, he continued to conduct the Navy’s affairs as if he was making policy for decades of Nazi hegemony. On 14 April, he volunteered to the Führer the services of 3,000 young naval personnel to operate as guerrillas behind enemy lines in the west, oblivious of the fact that these men were wholly untrained. Four days later, he circulated an order from naval headquarters, applauding the actions of a petty officer of the raiding cruiser
Cormoran
, who languished in a prison camp in Australia. This exemplary fig-ure, said the grand-admiral, had successfully killed every man among his fel-low PoWs who displayed communist leanings: “This petty officer is certain of my full recognition for his resolve and his execution. I shall promote him . . . on his return.”

Hitler’s ranting against his subordinates had increased in intensity. Guderian described one such session which continued for two hours, “his fists raised, his cheeks flushed with rage, his whole body trembling . . . After each outburst of rage Hitler would stride up and down the carpet edge, then suddenly stop immediately before me and hurl his next accusation. He was almost screaming, his eyes seemed about to pop out of his head and the veins stood out on his temples.” Afterwards Keitel, most despicable of Hitler’s military creatures, accosted Guderian and demanded: “How could you contradict the Führer in that way? Didn’t you see how excited he was getting? What would happen if as the result of such a scene he were to have a stroke?” After the Allies had seized Remagen, when Hitler demanded reinforcements, he was told that just five tank destroyers were available, under repair at Sennelager. The master of Germany, overlord of armies that once swept Europe, engrossed himself for some minutes in the deployment of five broken-down
Jagdtiger
. To the end, he maintained his determination that the German people should perish, rather than be permitted to save themselves by yielding. “No German town will be declared open,” asserted a signal from Berlin to Army Group Centre on 15 April. “Every village and every town will be defended and held by every possible man. Every German who contravenes his obvious natural duty will forfeit his honour and his life.”

Desperate shortages caused Hitler to strip weapons and equipment from units which seemed unwilling to fight, to arm and clothe those that would. Boots, uniforms, even underclothes were taken from customs and police departments and naval warehouses for issue to the Wehrmacht. Even among formations which still possessed substantial numbers of tanks and fuel to move them, many were immobilized by mechanical defects or lack of parts. The last available order of battle for the Eastern Front, which is dated 15 March, shows 2nd SS Panzer, for instance, with twenty-seven Panthers of which seventeen were operational, and twenty-six assault guns of which just seven were runners; likewise 9th SS Panzer, with twenty-five assault guns of which eleven were operational, along with twelve out of its thirty-five Panthers. The Grossdeutschland Panzergrenadier Division was reduced to two assault guns, neither operational; five Panthers, of which one was a runner; and six Tigers. This was the sum total of armoured support for a formation with an establishment of 16,000 men.

Hitler exploded when he heard that thousands of small arms were still in the hands of the Indian Legion, formed from prisoners taken while serving with the British. Their unit, he observed, is “a joke. These are Indians who couldn’t kill a louse, who’d rather be eaten themselves. They wouldn’t kill an Englishman.” He expressed similar scepticism about whether much could be expected from the Estonians in Wehrmacht uniform: “What are they still supposed to be fighting for, anyway? They’ve gone from their homeland.” General Wilhelm Burgdorf interjected apologetically: “If there are a lot of fainthearted people even with us, we really can’t demand it of those people.” It was ironic that amid crisis deficiencies of so many creations of twentieth-century technology for waging war, Germany’s generals in 1945 also found themselves protesting the shortage of horses. One of the last signals to OKH from General von Hoffman of 10th Parachute Division, on 16 April, complained that he lacked 60 per cent of the animals essential for his formation: “My parachutists have been obliged to drag their artillery 12 miles, for lack of horses to pull the guns.”

Lieutenant Tony Saurma of the Grossdeutschland Division was among those brought back from the beleaguered garrison of Samland on the Baltic by submarine, to train men for the defence of Berlin. He was horrified to be appointed to command a troop of Mark IV tanks dug in near the Larterbahnhof station. “I found myself commanding men of sixty, even seventy. And the Russians were only thirty miles away!” After a few days, Saurma said to the grateful old men: “Go home. We don’t need you. And if anybody wants to report me, they can do so.” The lieutenant was profoundly relieved when he was reposted to Schleswig-Holstein before the Berlin battle began.

In one of Hitler’s rare moments of realism, he dismissed suggestions that he should leave the capital, to maintain his defence of the Reich from the south: “As an inglorious refugee from Berlin, I would have no authority in either northern or southern Germany, and in Berchtesgaden even less.” Somewhere in the tortured maze of his consciousness, he knew that the end was at hand. He perceived a dignity in fighting to the last for Berlin, which would be denied to him as a fugitive. His own passing might attain an appropriate grandeur if it also embraced the deaths of sufficient thousands of lesser mortals. “Everyone now has a chance to choose the part which he will play in the film a hundred years hence,” Goebbels told his Propaganda Ministry staff in an oration on 17 April. “I can assure you that it will be a fine and elevating picture . . . Hold out now, so that a hundred years hence the audience does not hoot and whistle when you appear on the screen.”

E
ISENHOWER
’
S FRANKNESS
with Stalin about his lack of ambitions towards Berlin was neither credited nor reciprocated. Stalin did not believe that the Supreme Commander would forgo this great prize when it was plain that the German front was collapsing before the Americans and British. Indeed, Stalin was irked that the enemy had opened to the Western allies so easy a passage. This fed all his paranoia about the collusion natural between bourgeois capitalist societies. Russia’s warlord was determined that the Soviet Union should seize Hitler’s capital. He shared with his German counterpart an absolute indifference to the human cost of his decisions. The two foremost monsters of twentieth-century history embarked upon their last encounter with matching appetites for a titanic showdown.

At a critical meeting in his study at the Kremlin on 1 April, Stalin told Zhukov and Konev of his belief that the Anglo-Americans were driving for Berlin. Famously, he asked: “Who is going to take Berlin: are we or are the Allies?” Konev instantly gave Stalin the reply he wanted: “It is we who shall take Berlin, and we will take it before the Allies.” Stalin smiled thinly: “So that’s the sort of man you are.” Doubt persists about whether the Russians sincerely feared a Western drive for Berlin, or whether Stalin merely used the threat to goad his marshals. It seems likely that he indeed feared pre-emption.

In Moscow, he observed to Zhukov and Konev that virtually all remaining German military strength was now concentrated on the Oder. Zhukov said that according to his own intelligence reports the Germans had deployed against him some ninety divisions in four armies, together with 1,500 tanks, 3,500 aircraft and 10,000 guns. This was a wildly extravagant estimate. The German divisions were ruins, largely bereft of equipment. It was years since the Luftwaffe had possessed 3,500 operational aircraft. Overall German strength of some 300,000 men facing Zhukov was vastly outweighed by that of the Russian armies. But it was true that Hitler had thrown into his line east of Berlin almost every man capable of holding a weapon, and every fighting vehicle the Wehrmacht and SS could move to the Oder. “I think it’s going to be quite a fight,” said Stalin. Over the years, Zhukov had become skilled in reading the Soviet warlord’s mood by every detail of his behaviour: the tunic he wore, whether he stroked his moustache, whether he lit his Dunhill pipe. Now, he did the latter, usually a good sign. Zhukov and Konev were mighty men at the head of their armies, yet they became no more than useful creatures, utterly at the mercy of his whims, in the presence of their terrible master.

Stalin signalled Eisenhower that he agreed with the Americans that Berlin was no longer important, and that Russia would commit only limited forces. In reality, 2.5 million men and 6,250 tanks were deployed for the assault on Hitler’s capital. Zhukov and his 1st Belorussian Front would be granted the dubious honour of launching the assault. Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front would attack from the south. Konev’s men would initially drive westwards, south of Berlin, and turn north towards the city only if Zhukov’s tank armies failed to smash their way through. “Whoever breaks in first, let him take Berlin,” said Stalin, drawing the start line on the Oder bank for his marshals’ race for Hitler’s capital. Rokossovsky’s forces were still mopping up north-east Germany, but would join the attack as soon as they could redeploy. The plan anticipated the capture of the city on 22 April, Lenin’s birthday.

It would be foolish to suppose that every man of the Red Army welcomed the opportunity for glory thrust upon him by the Oder crossing and the battle for Berlin. Most had been fighting for a long, long time. Like American and British soldiers, as victory beckoned, they began to cherish the possibility of survival, of going home. “In the last days of the war,” wrote Gabriel Temkin, with Twenty-seventh Army near Lake Balaton, “everybody, much more than ever before, was thinking about life and death—his own.” “We’d all had enough,” said Corporal Nikolai Ponomarev of the 374th Rifle Division. He had been wounded twice, and was now increasingly fearful of being sent to the Far East to fight the Japanese when the German war was over. “In the last month, especially, one felt that one wanted to get home alive,” said Vladimir Gormin of 3rd Ukrainian Front. Their loneliness was compounded by the fact that the Red Army was now so far from its homes that its men could no longer pick up Russian stations on their radios.

Zhukov and Konev cleared a zone fifteen miles deep behind their front of all civilians, as they prepared for the battle. They found themselves facing severe difficulties with a flood of new replacements, some of whom reached the armies with only a week’s military training. “Many have proved unstable in action, and indeed cowardly,” reported 1st Ukrainian Front on 7 April. “There have been cases of self-inflicted wounds. One rifle battalion containing 75% replacements broke and ran. Its officers shot five men on the spot to restore order.” Konev’s staff reported cases of mutiny which seem astounding given the inevitable fate of those involved. On 6 April, Privates Tarasyuk and Cheburko “categorically refused to take the military oath, asserting that they were Evangelists.” Cheburko said: “I follow in the footsteps of Christ. I will not take up arms or kill people.” The two men were dispatched immediately to a military tribunal. Another soldier who wounded himself before the battle began was shot in front of his unit. Yet the Political Department continued to record extraordinary instances of dissent. One soldier named Kaleshov, a former captive of the Germans, was rash enough to grumble that Russia’s rulers “betrayed us in 1941 and they will betray us again now . . . I was better off as a German prisoner.” Konev’s staff complained that they were desperately short of clothing and equipment for replacements. Sixty-five thousand uniforms ordered in January had still not been delivered, and young soldiers were parading in rotten boots, without tunics or even underclothes: “They don’t look like soldiers.”