Five Days That Shocked the World: Eyewitness Accounts from Europe at the End of World War II (19 page)

Worst of all was the news just in from Milan. Franco read the accounts of Mussolini’s death that morning with horror. Dangled upside down in front of a baying mob, his face bashed in, his body poked with sticks. Hitler would doubtless be the next Fascist leader to suffer a similar fate. And after that? In a country still bitterly divided by his leadership, Francisco Franco didn’t even want to think about it.

*   *   *

HE WAS NOT ALONE
in his unease. In the royal palace at Oslo, Vidkun Quisling, too, was afraid that there might be a price to pay for backing the wrong side in the war. As Norway’s so-called minister-president, installed by the Nazis after they deposed King Haakon and abolished the monarchy, Quisling knew that he could expect short shrift when Haakon returned from exile in England and the Norwegians regained control of their country. The Norwegian government in exile had already announced its intention of calling him to account for the years of collaboration. So had the Norwegian Resistance and many of the ordinary population. Quisling’s was a name that had long since passed into the language as a byword for treason of the worst kind.

Quisling had been the leader of Norway’s Fascist Party before the war, but he had never won more than 2 percent of the popular vote. He had stormed into a radio studio during the German invasion in 1940, proclaiming himself prime minister and ordering all resistance to halt at once. The Germans had installed him as a puppet leader, but no Norwegians of any standing had agreed to serve in his Cabinet. Quisling had spent the war years in office yet not in power, merely doing the Germans’ bidding. He had encouraged Norwegians to join the SS and assisted the Germans in deporting Norway’s Jews. He had also been responsible for the execution of Norwegians in the Resistance, something that was unlikely to be forgotten when peace returned to the country.

His immediate concern was to ensure an orderly transfer of power after the departure of the Germans. He had held a Cabinet meeting at the palace on April 29 to discuss the radio reports of Himmler’s secret approach to the Allies. The reports had been rapturously received in Norway. People had come out onto the streets to celebrate, until advised by the Resistance to keep their heads down and avoid gathering in crowds. With the Nazis obviously disintegrating, Quisling’s Cabinet had decided to reconstitute itself as a transitional government, one that no longer had any business with the Germans but was merely there “to prevent chaos, civil war and military activity on Norwegian soil” until the war was over. After that, it was anybody’s guess what would happen.

Quisling suspected that he was doomed in the long run, but was still hoping for a miracle. Like many Fascist leaders, he had little idea of how much he was loathed by ordinary people. The Germans had offered to put a U-boat at his disposal, and he had friends who could hide him if need be, but he wasn’t prepared to cut and run as his time came to an end. Explaining it to his secretary, he insisted that he had done his best for Norway and that his conscience was clear:

I shall remain sitting where I am sitting. A political vacuum would be the worst thing that could happen. In any case, I have the satisfaction of having governed Norway equally as long as Olav Tryggvason, and certainly no worse, all things considered. As far as I am concerned, I shall hand over the country in an equally good condition to its future rulers, assuming that they won’t be the Russians. Against the Russians, I would mobilise everyone capable of carrying arms, whatever the consequences.
9

Olav Tryggvason had been a Viking king, much admired by his people. Quisling hadn’t been admired at all. Yet he was no coward. He had decided to turn himself over to the incoming Norwegian government, if the worse came to the worst, and accept whatever fate they decided for him. At best it would be a long spell in prison; at worst, execution by firing squad. But Quisling wasn’t afraid. He would rather that than run away or kill himself, as so many others in his Cabinet were thinking of doing, now that the Nazis were no longer there to protect them.

11

ASSAULT ON THE REICHSTAG

IN BERLIN,
the Russians were preparing to attack the Reichstag. Fighting had continued throughout the night as they struggled to secure the Ministry of the Interior, flushing the Germans out of the vast office complex one room at a time. There was still sporadic shooting on the top floors as dawn broke, but the rest of the building was safely in Russian hands. Cooks in the basement were busily preparing breakfast for the assault troops while their commanders studied the Reichstag through their binoculars and braced themselves for the ordeal ahead.

Germany’s Parliament building was only four hundred yards away, but it might just as well have been on the moon from where they were standing. The intervening ground was a rabbit warren of shell holes, trenches, railway sleepers, overturned trams, barbed wire, and flooded waterways—every kind of obstacle to an advance. The approaches to the Reichstag were heavily defended, and the building itself may have had a thousand troops inside. The Germans weren’t going to give up their Parliament building without a struggle.

But the Russians were determined to fly their flag over its giant dome before nightfall, in good time for next morning’s May Day celebrations in Moscow. The leading units had been equipped with flags specially made for the purpose, Red Banners of Victory with extra large hammer-and-sickle emblems to be planted over “the lair of the Fascist beast.” The units were in competition to see who planted their banner first.

The assault began at 5:00 a.m. with a preliminary bombardment, every available gun pouring fire into the Reichstag at point-blank range. An hour later, the first wave of troops attacked, emerging from cover and charging forward across the rubble. They got fifty yards before being cut down. Others followed and were killed, too. Much of the defending fire came from the Kroll Opera House, across the square from the Reichstag. The Russian commanders decided that they would have to capture the opera house first, before turning their full attention on the Reichstag.

It took them most of the morning, because the nearby buildings had to be secured as well. Reinforcements poured in over the Moltke Bridge, guns and tanks rumbling forward to join the assault. They came under fire from German antiaircraft guns on the giant concrete flak tower near the Zoological Gardens and from other positions in the Tiergarten. The Russians responded in kind, hitting the Tiergarten with a devastating combination of rockets and heavy artillery that blasted everything in its path. The sun was shining and the birds were singing in the trees, but artillery officer Siegfried Knappe remembered only the destruction as the Russian shells rained down around him:

Through the springtime foliage of the Tiergarten the shells burst without interruption, destroying everything in their path. Small-arms fire was everywhere. Blinding sunshine lay over a gruesome scene. On the lawns of the Tiergarten, under mutilated age-old trees, I could recognise artillery pieces, all put out of action by direct hits. The gunners who had not made it were lying around, so mutilated that they were hardly recognisable as human beings. Everywhere in the streets, the dead could be seen amid piles of dust-covered debris. Abandoned shoes lay here and there. I remembered the first combat dead I had seen in France so long ago, and how shocked I had been at the sight. Now my sensibilities were so numb that a corpse was little more than an obstacle to step over. When I stopped to catch my breath or wait for a salvo to pass, I could see in gruesome detail the outlines of a human torso, or part of one, between pieces of brick, rock or concrete.
1

The firing was so intense that the sun quickly disappeared, blotted out by a rising cloud of smoke and dust. The Russians took the Kroll Opera House by the end of the morning and turned toward the Reichstag in the early afternoon. As with the Ministry of the Interior, every room on every floor was held by a mix of sailors, SS, and Hitler Youth, all determined not to give an inch, if Russian accounts were to be believed. The Germans were supported by Frenchmen, traitors to their country, who had volunteered for the SS’s Charlemagne Legion and had nothing to lose by fighting on. For some at least, it was Bolshevism they were fighting, not just the Russians. They fought for their beliefs, and because they were desperate, and because they would have no future if they surrendered. They also had nowhere left to retreat to, with the Russians already in the Wilhelmstrasse behind them. The defenders of the Reichstag really did have their backs to the wall.

In the noise and confusion, it was difficult to know when exactly the Russians finally reached the Reichstag. Some thought it was about three o’clock; others in a renewed attack, just after dark. The doors and windows had been blocked, which meant that they had to blast their way in with artillery and horizontally aimed mortars and then throw in grenades before storming the building. Casualties on both sides were high as the defenders fought back. Some Russian sergeants apparently pestered their officers for the honor of carrying the red banner into the Reichstag and raising it on the roof. Most knew better than to volunteer. Honor and glory were for the generals and political commissars, not the ordinary soldiers. They just wanted to come out of it alive.

There were propaganda considerations, too, because whoever raised the banner was sure to be made a hero of the Soviet Union. That meant no Chechens, Kalmyks, Crimean Tartars, or anyone else in exile from his homeland. But it could mean a Georgian, if one was available, because Stalin was from Georgia, so the publicity value would be high. The Russians’ political officers had already nominated suitable soldiers for the banner parties. All the chosen ones had to do, as darkness fell, was storm up the stairs and plant their flag on the dome.

But the Germans still stood in the way. According to Russian accounts, perhaps exaggerated for propaganda purposes, the Germans responded with grenades and Panzerfausts as the Russians burst in. The grand stone columns of the Reichstag’s entrance hall were quickly spattered with blood as the casualties mounted. Fire and smoke filled the building. The Russians advanced over the bodies of their own men, lobbing grenades up the stairs and spraying the Germans with submachine-gun fire in the dark. Hundreds of Germans retreated to the basement. The rest withdrew slowly up the broad stairs, firing along the corridors and defending themselves room by room, refusing to give ground as they settled in for a long, hard fight. As with the Ministry of the Interior, it would take all night to winkle them out. Perhaps the following day as well.

But the Russians couldn’t wait that long. Men of the 756th Regiment, carrying Banner of Victory No. 5, forced their way up the stairs and got as far as the second floor before being pinned down by German fire. They managed to unfurl the banner and wave it from a window, though not from the cupola itself. The fighting continued for hours before the Russians tried again. At some point they did reach the roof, although exactly when is open to dispute. It was reported to Moscow that the Soviet flag was flying proudly over the Reichstag in time for May Day, exactly as planned. By some accounts, though, the report was written while the building was still being stormed and then wrongly flashed to headquarters. The only certainty was that the Reichstag was still full of Germans as the night wore on, and they were very far from surrender. On every floor, and in the cellars of the basement, they were still fighting to the death.

*   *   *

IN HIS BUNKER
at the Chancellery, just over half a mile away, Adolf Hitler had been woken by the guns at 5:00 a.m. as the Russian barrage began. Even in his personal quarters, under thirty feet of concrete, the sound was inescapable. The Chancellery was being pounded by artillery so close that the Russians were often firing over open sights. In his dressing gown and slippers, weary and bleary-eyed, Hitler knew that the end could not long be delayed, either for him or for Germany.

He was still in his dressing gown when SS general Wilhelm Mohnke came to his anteroom at six. Mohnke did not mince words when Hitler asked how much longer the bunker could hold out:

I spoke of one or two days. The Russians were at Potsdamer Platz, less than four hundred metres from the Chancellery, they had reached Wilhelmstrasse and the greater part of the Tiergarten and they had penetrated the subway tunnels under Friedrichstrasse. Hitler listened to me without interrupting, then gave me his hand in parting and said: “All the best. I thank you. It wasn’t only for Germany.” The meeting was over towards 6:30 a.m. and I returned to my command post.
2

Half an hour later, Eva Hitler went upstairs and took a turn in the Chancellery garden. It was a lovely spring morning. She told the guard that she wanted to see the sun once more. Hitler joined her after a while, but the shelling intensified just as he appeared. Turning round at once, he hurried inside again and disappeared back down his burrow.

His wife followed. The bunker staff were unsure how to address her now that she was married, especially the ones who had always thought her rather silly. Most couldn’t bring themselves to call her Frau Hitler, and settled for the unmarried
gnädiges Fräulein
instead. She told them not to be embarrassed. “You may safely call me Frau Hitler,” she insisted cheerfully.
3

Back in her own room, afraid of being alone, she summoned Traudl Junge for a chat. They sat talking about whatever came into their heads, desperately spinning out the conversation rather than sitting glumly with their own thoughts. After a while, Eva Hitler opened her wardrobe and took out her favorite silver fox fur, one that she had always loved to wear. “I’d like to give you this coat as a goodbye present,” she told Junge. “I always liked to have well-dressed ladies around me. I want you to have it now and enjoy wearing it.”
4

Junge was touched. She had no idea what she was going to do with a fur coat at a time like this, but she appreciated the thought. She thanked Eva profusely, and meant it. She had always liked Hitler’s wife.