Five Days That Shocked the World: Eyewitness Accounts from Europe at the End of World War II (28 page)

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JUST UP THE ROAD,
the fight was still going on at the Reichstag, even though the red flag now flew from the roof. Choked with dust and smoke, desperate for water, the German defenders were doggedly refusing to give in. The upper stories of the building had been cleared, but the cellars and the dressing station in the basement remained in their hands. It wasn’t until late afternoon that they decided they had had enough and called for a senior Russian officer to come and negotiate. With a coat covering his badges of rank, Lieutenant Berest went forward and introduced himself as a colonel. The Germans laid down their arms soon afterward, emerging nervously from the basement with their hands in the air as they stepped uncertainly into the daylight.

Almost three hundred came out, “smiling like obedient dogs” as they wondered if they were going to be shot. Two hundred had been killed in the fighting, and another five hundred lay wounded in the basement. The German defense of the Reichstag had been stubborn and fanatical, according to the Russians, but a German survivor later claimed that they had greatly exaggerated the fighting for propaganda purposes and he himself had seen very little. Yet some Germans had certainly fought stubbornly, because a handful still refused to surrender and were not finally persuaded to lay down their arms until their own side ordered them to the following day.

But the Reichstag had fallen, to all intents and purposes. So had the Spandau Citadel, a seventeenth-century fortress at the junction of the Havel and Spree rivers. The flak tower in the Zoological Gardens was in the process of surrendering. The only significant building that remained in German hands on the afternoon of May 1was the Reichs Chancellery. It was an object of even greater interest to the Russians now that they had learned from Krebs that there was an underground bunker in the garden where Adolf Hitler had spent his last days. All eyes were turned in that direction, and all guns were trained on the target as Zhukov’s deadline for a surrender passed and the Russians opened up on the Chancellery with every weapon they had.

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AT RUHLEBEN,
there was very little fighting that day as the Russians bypassed the area around the Reichssportsfeld and concentrated their fire on the Chancellery. With life hanging by a thread and a gaggle of SS girls in their midst, the men in Helmut Altner’s unit had followed the Chancellery’s lead as they waited for the next attack. Sent to wake up a man for sentry duty, Altner found him under a blanket with a naked girl. Her firm breasts hit Altner full in the eyes as the man got up and the blanket slipped from her shoulders.

Later, if Altner’s memory was correct, his friend Windhorst showed him a proclamation for the armed forces that had been printed during the night. Due to be broadcast on the radio next morning, it was still supposed to be secret and should never have fallen into Windhorst’s hands:

It is announced from Führer Headquarters that our Führer Adolf Hitler fell for Germany at his command post at the Reichs Chancellery this afternoon while fighting against Bolshevism to his last breath. On 30 April the Führer appointed Grand Admiral Dönitz as his successor.
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Altner was shocked, but only for a moment. “I feel as if I had been hit on the head. But then it is all the same to me, it hardly bothers me, for the time is over when I once thought that the heavens would collapse if that man no longer lived. Then we discuss it, and the news that is so meaningful begins to pale. Only the thought that I must really be free now, as the man to whom I swore an oath is no longer alive, makes me happy. But Windhorst says that Hitler has declared that the oath applies to his successor.”

Other soldiers took the news harder than Altner. A heated discussion broke out in the cellar as Sergeant Major Kaiser spread the word that Hitler was dead. The announcement was followed by a gasp and then a sudden silence when Kaiser suggested that, far from fighting Bolshevism to his last breath, Hitler might have taken poison to avoid being beaten to death by the troops. Kaiser’s words would have been treasonable once, grounds for immediate execution. But not anymore.

Everyone wondered if Hitler’s death meant the end of the war. Not for the moment, certainly, because it was still going on outside. Some new SS girls arrived after lunch, unfamiliar faces flirting with the soldiers around the table in the knowledge that they would probably all be dead by tomorrow. Altner was surprised that the company commander was tolerating the situation, until he saw that the company commander had a girl, too. He told himself that if they all carried on like that, the girls who had arrived yesterday would be disappointed that night. They would have to hang back and wait their turn until the new ones had been “tried out.”

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HILDEGARD KNEF
was in a deep sleep. After a dreadful night dodging the enemy, she and Ewald von Demandowsky had reached the Kurfürstendamm at dawn. It had been Berlin’s most fashionable street once, but it was a war zone now as the Russians approached. Knef and Demandowsky had found shelter with a friend of Demandowsky’s mother, a little old lady of eighty-two. While a tank trundled past with a dead man dangling from the turret, the old lady had taken them to her apartment and given them water, smiling cheerfully and chatting as she made them a cup of coffee. The old lady was so serene and unruffled that Knef wondered if she had any idea of what was happening in the street outside.

The house was rolling like a trawler in the barrage. Looking in the mirror, Knef failed to recognize the bloodstained, sweaty figure, with a dirty face and torn hands, that she saw in the glass. Certain that she was about to die, she had tried to write a last letter to her mother, telling her that it was all over and there was no way out, thanking her for a nice life. But the words hadn’t come and her tears had stained the page. Knef had torn the letter up and fallen asleep instead.

Now she was being woken again, sitting bolt upright as the old lady told her that the Russians had arrived and were in the cellar next door. They had to leave at once. The Russians would destroy the house if they found any soldiers there.

“I’m terribly sorry,” the old lady apologized. “You’ll have to leave. The other tenants insist on it.”
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She thrust some cigarettes into Demandowsky’s hands as compensation. He and Knef stood on the doorstep with no idea of where to go. The other tenants swore at them through the cellar grating, telling them to disappear before the Russians spotted them. They ran off up the road, past the body of a blue-faced boy with a swollen tongue hanging from a tree. “I Am a Coward,” read the placard on his chest. “I Was Too Afraid to Fight for My Fatherland.”

They hadn’t got much farther when they ran into a German officer with clusters on his collar.

“Where have you come from?” he demanded.

“Schmargendorf. We lost the others.”

“When?”

“Yesterday, yesterday morning.”

The officer was skeptical. Knef and von Demandowsky looked like deserters to him.

“Follow me,” he said.
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They were taken to a command post on Albrecht-Achillesstrasse. Another officer ordered them to stand in line and await sentence. They had deserted their company in the face of the enemy. They didn’t need to be told that the sentence for that was summary execution.

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BACK IN THE BUNKER,
Colonel von Dufving had managed to get through with the telephone line. He had been arrested by the SS as a traitor when he returned to his own lines, but had talked his way out of it. The telephone cable had proved to be too short, so an extension had been added, only to be cut in half by shellfire. But von Dufving had persevered, and now there was a line connecting the Chancellery with Chuikov’s headquarters near the airport.

Krebs was on the phone at once, asking to speak to Göbbels. Göbbels told him to come back to the Chancellery, bringing the Russians’ demands with him, so that they could discuss it in person. To prevent any misunderstandings, Krebs repeated the list of demands to Chuikov before he left:

1.
Surrender of Berlin.

2.
All those surrendering to give up their arms.

3.
The lives of all ranks to be spared.

4.
Help for the wounded.

5.
Talks with the Allies by radio.

Chuikov nodded his agreement. It was eight minutes past one, by his watch, when Krebs set out. He appeared very reluctant to go, searching for his gloves and then a nonexistent haversack, looking for any excuse not to leave the safety of Russian headquarters. It seemed to Chuikov that Krebs was longing to be taken prisoner, preferring to take his chances with the Russians rather than go back to the madhouse and die like a rat in a trap with the rest of them. But Chuikov wasn’t going to help him out. Krebs was more use to him in the bunker.

Göbbels wasn’t pleased to see him when he got back. Krebs was supposed to be returning with a guarantee of safe conduct for them all, a ticket out of there for anyone of any importance in the bunker. Instead, all he had come back with was an invitation to surrender.

“Surrender?” Göbbels barked. “I’m not going to use the few hours I have left as Chancellor to sign an instrument of surrender.”
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The others agreed. There was nothing for them in surrender. What they wanted was safe passage out of there, not surrender.

They decided to reject the Russians’ terms and fight on. It would be dark in another few hours. They could escape then, leaving their dimmer retainers to hold off the Russians while they slipped down the U-Bahn line and disappeared into the network of tunnels. It wasn’t much of a prospect, but it was better than putting up their hands and waiting to be hanged by the Allies.

Watching Göbbels and the others as they decided against surrender, news reader Hans Fritsche saw that they were all mad, completely cut off from reality. Fritsche was a popular broadcaster and a senior official in the Propaganda Ministry, but he retained a sense of proportion. He knew that surrender was the only sensible option left for Berlin. With the rest still refusing to countenance it, he decided to take matters into his own hands. Heading back to the ruins of his office on Wilhelmplatz, he sat down to compose a surrender offer of his own to Marshal Zhukov.

He hadn’t got very far when General Burgdorf burst in, drunk and trembling with rage.

“Is it true that you’re going to hand the city over to the Russians?” Burgdorf demanded.

Fritsche nodded, whereupon Burgdorf announced that he would have to shoot him, because Hitler’s order forbidding surrender was still in force. He produced a pistol, only to have it knocked out of his hand by the radio technician who had shown him in to Fritsche’s room. Burgdorf was overpowered and escorted back to the Chancellery, leaving Fritsche free to continue with his approach to the Russians.

While he went ahead, the people in the bunker prepared to make their escape. The vast majority had chosen to join the breakout, but one or two preferred to remain behind and take their chances where they stood. The plan was for the escapees to slip away in groups of twenty or more, crawling out of the cellar window underneath Hitler’s reviewing balcony at the Chancellery, then sprinting across Wilhelmplatz into the Kaiserhof U-Bahn station. From there, it was a matter of fanning out along the railway tunnels, putting a safe distance between themselves and the bunker before daybreak and hoping that they didn’t bump into any Russians coming the other way.

Traudl Junge was one of those who had elected to go. Konstanze Manziarly, Hitler’s cook, was another. She had had to make Hitler’s supper the previous night, trying hard not to cry as she ostentatiously cooked fried eggs and creamed potatoes for him so that no one would know he was dead. The two women were issued with a pistol each and boots, trousers, steel helmets—everything they needed for a breakout. The bunker’s storerooms were opened and supplies freely distributed: canned food, wine, champagne, chocolate, all sorts of luxury items that hadn’t been seen for ages. At any other time the women might have gorged themselves silly, but luxury items were no use to them now, in the middle of an inferno. They were far better off with ration packs and a water bottle.

A few people had decided to stay behind in the bunker. General Burgdorf was too drunk to go anywhere, and General Krebs too exhausted after his trip to Chuikov’s headquarters. Göbbels, too, had chosen to remain. With a club foot and six small children, he knew he had no chance of slipping through the Russian lines. He and his wife had elected to commit suicide instead, killing their children before the Russians came, and then themselves. Several people had offered to take the children out with them, keeping their identity secret from the Russians, but the Göbbels had refused. “I would rather have my children die than live in disgrace,” Magda Göbbels had told Traudl Junge. “Our children have no place in Germany as it will be after the war.”
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The Göbbels family had lived together as a single unit, and they were going to die together as well.

But it wasn’t time for that yet. Göbbels still had his diary to complete. He had kept a diary for many years, a daily account of his life at the heart of the Third Reich. Shutting himself in his room while his wife sat with the children and the rest of the bunker waited for dusk, Göbbels took pen and paper and settled down to make the final entry in the story of his life. It was a seven-page summary for posterity of everything that he and Hitler had been trying to achieve when they embarked on the course that had now ended so disastrously for both of them.

17

THE NAZIS REGROUP

FAR AWAY IN PLÖN, ADMIRAL DÖNITZ
was still bug-eyed from lack of sleep after talking to Himmler through the night. But there was no time to rest. He was hard at work with his staff when he received another signal from Martin Bormann in the bunker. Despatched at 0740 that morning, it reached Dönitz just before eleven: “Will now in force. Coming to you soonest. Until then, in my opinion, withhold publication.”