The Fall of Berlin 1945 (23 page)

The Nazi Party in Berlin talked of mobilizing armies of civilians to work on defences - both an 'obstacle ring' thirty kilometres out and a perimeter ring. But the maximum workforce ever achieved on one day was 70,000; it was usually no more than 30,000. Transport and a shortage of tools were the main problems, apart from the fact that most Berlin factories and offices continued to work as if nothing were amiss.

Reymann appointed Colonel Lohbeck, an engineer officer, to take over the Party-led chaos of defence works and he called on the school of military engineering at Karlshorst to provide demolition teams. Army officers were nervous about Speer's attempts to save the bridges within Berlin. They could not forget the execution of the officers over the bridge at Remagen. Reymann's sappers supervised the Todt Organization and the Reich Labour Service, both of which were far better equipped than the civilian corvée, but they found it impossible to obtain fuel and spare parts for the mechanical diggers. Most of the 17,000 French prisoners of war from Stalag III D were put to work in the city, creating barricades and digging foxholes in pavements at street corners. How much they achieved is open to question, however, especially since French prisoners round Berlin were those most regularly accused of being '
Arbeitsunlustig
' - reluctant to work - and of escaping from their camps, usually to visit German women.

Attempts to liaise with the field commanders, who were supposed to provide fighting troops for the defence of the city, were far from successful. When Refior went to visit Heinrici's chief of staff, Lieutenant General Kinzel, at Army Group Vistula headquarters, Kinzel simply glanced at the plans he presented for the defence of Berlin and said, 'Those madmen in Berlin should stew in their own juice.' The Ninth Army's chief of staff", Major General Hölz, regarded the plans as irrelevant for other reasons. 'The Ninth Army,' said Hölz, in a manner which Refior found rather too theatrical, 'stands and stays on the Oder. If it should be necessary, we will fall there, but we will not retreat.'

Neither Reymann nor Refior realized fully at the time that General Heinrici and his staff at Army Group Vistula had a very different plan from the Nazi leadership. They were hoping to prevent a last-ditch defence of the capital for the sake of the civil population. Albert Speer had suggested to Heinrici that the Ninth Army should withdraw from the Oder, bypassing Berlin entirely. Heinrici agreed in principle. In his view, the best way to avoid fighting in the city would be to order Reymann to send all his troops forward to the Oder at the last moment to strip Berlin of its defenders.

Another strong reason for avoiding a battle in the city was the Nazis' resort to boys as young as fourteen as cannon fodder. So many houses had a framed photograph on the wall of a son killed in Russia that a silent prayer arose that the regime would collapse before these children were sent into battle. Some did not shrink from openly calling it infanticide, whether it was exploiting the fanaticism of deluded Hitler Youth or forcing frightened boys into uniform through threat of execution. Older teachers in schools risked denunciation by advising their pupils on how to avoid being called up. The sense of bitterness was even greater after Goebbels's speech a few weeks before. 'The Führer once coined the phrase,' he reminded them,' "Each mother who has given birth to a child has struck a blow for the future of our people." But it was now clear that Hitler and Goebbels were about to throw those children's lives away for a cause which had no possible future.

The fourteen-year-old Erich Schmidtke in Prenzlauerberg had been called up as a 'flak helper' to man anti-aircraft guns and ordered to report to the Hermann Göring barracks in Reinickendorf. His mother, whose husband was trapped with the army in Courland, was understandably upset and accompanied him to the barracks with his little suitcase.

He felt more awed than afraid. After three days in the barracks, they were ordered to join the division being assembled at the Reichssportsfeld in the west of the city, next to the Olympic stadium. But on his way there, he thought of his father's words when on leave from the Eastern Front, telling him that he was now responsible for the family. He decided to desert and went into hiding until the war was over. Most of his contemporaries who joined the division were killed.

The so-called Hitler Youth Division raised bv the Reich Youth Leader, Artur Axmann, was also being trained at the Reichssportsfeld on the use of the panzerfaust. Axmann lectured them on the heroism of Sparta and tried to inspire an unwavering hatred of the enemy and an unwavering loyalty to Adolf Hitler. 'There is only victory or defeat,' he told them. Some of the young found their suicidal task ahead deeply stirring. Reinhard Appel thought of Rilke's
Cornet
charging out against the Turks, just as the lost generation of 1914 had when they volunteered.

The fact that a detachment of
'Blitzmädel'
girls was also billeted on the Reichssportsfeld no doubt heightened the romantic appeal.

The Nazi leadership was also preparing at this time a
Wehrmachthelferinnenkorps
of female military auxiliaries. Young women had to swear an oath of allegiance which began, 'I swear that I will be true and obedient to Adolf Hitler, the Führer and commander in chief of the Wehrmacht.' The words made it sound like a mass marriage. For somebody who had perhaps diverted his sexual drive into the pursuit of power, this may have provided its own form of
ersatz
fantasy.

In the Wilhelmstrasse district of ministries, government officials were trying to convince any diplomats who remained in the city that they were 'deciphering telegrams between Roosevelt and Churchill within two hours of their dispatch'. Meanwhile, rumours circulated of Communist shock troops being formed in the eastern 'Red' part of the city to liquidate Nazi Party members. 'There is an atmosphere of desperation at the top,' the Swedish military attache reported to Stockholm. 'A determination to sell their lives dearly.' In fact, the only sabotage groups came from the other side of the lines, when members of the Soviet-controlled Freies Deutschland in Wehrmacht uniform slipped through German positions and moved towards Berlin. They cut cables, but little more. Freies Deutschland later claimed that its resistance group Osthafen had blown up a munitions dump in Berlin, but this is far from certain.

On 9 April, a number of well-known opponents of the regime were butchered by the SS in a variety of concentration camps. The order was given to ensure their deaths before the enemy could release them. In Dachau, Johann Georg Elser, the Communist who had tried to assassin- ate Hitler in the Burger Brau on 8 November 1939, was killed. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Admiral Canaris and General Oster were executed in Flossenbürg and Hans von Dohnanyi in Sachsenhausen.

'Revenge is coming!' - '
Die Vergeltung kommt!
- had been the Nazi propaganda slogan for the V-weapons. But this now had a hollow echo for officers on the Oder front as they awaited the onslaught. It was Soviet revenge which was coming and they knew that there were no more miracle weapons to save them. Many of them, under heavy pressure from above, lied to their men even more than before other similar defeats, with promises of miracle weapons, of rifts in the enemy coalition and of reinforcements. This was to contribute to the breakdown in discipline at the end of the battle.

Even the Waffen SS began to suffer from an unprecedented resentment between soldiers and officers. Eberhard Baumgart, the clerk with the SS Division 30.
Januar
, went back to headquarters to deal with a report, but found that the sentries would not let him in. A look through the windows soon explained why. 'I thought I was dreaming,' he wrote later. 'Glittering dress uniforms swirled around with tarted-up wromen, music, noise, laughter, shrieking, cigarette smoke and clinking glasses.' Baumgart's mood next day was not helped when Georg, the Volga German interpreter, showed him a cartoon from
Pravda
of Hitler, Goring and Goebbels in an orgy in the Reich Chancellery. The caption read, 'Every day the German soldier holds on lengthens our lives.'

Instead of miracle weapons, many of the Volkssturm and other improvised units received weapons that wrere useless, such as the
Volks- handgranate 45
. This 'people's hand grenade' wras simply a lump of concrete around a small explosive charge and a No. 8 detonator. It was more dangerous to the thrower than to the target. One detachment of officer cadets facing a Guards tank army received rifles captured from the French army in 1940 and just five rounds each. It was typical of Nazi corporate bluster that they continued to create impressive-sounding units - whether the
Sturmzug
, which lacked the weapons to storm anything, or the
Panzerjadgkompanie
, which was supposed to stalk tanks on foot.

Another formation, which had better reason than most to fear the consequences of capture, was the 1st Division of General Vlasov's Russian Army of Liberation. It had been Himmler's idea to bring the Vlasov division to the Oder front. He had trouble persuading Hitler, who still disliked the idea of using Slav troops. The German general staff had supported the idea earlier in the war of raising a Ukrainian army of a million men, but Hitler vetoed the plan, determined to maintain the separation of
'Herrenmensch und das Sklavenvolk'
. And then the terrible treatment of the Ukrainian people under Rosenberg and Gauleiter Koch in the Ukraine had put an end to Wehrmacht hopes.

Early in April, General Vlasov, accompanied by a liaison officer and an interpreter, came to Army Group Vistula headquarters to discuss matters with General Heinrici. Vlasov was a tall, rather gaunt man, with 'clever eyes' set in a colourless face, with one of those chins which looked grey even when freshly shaved. After a few optimistic expressions by Vlasov, Heinrici asked bluntly how such a recently formed division would perform in combat. German officers were concerned that these Russian volunteers would refuse to fight their fellow countrymen at the last moment. Now that the Third Reich was doomed to destruction, there was little incentive, save desperation, for the Vlasov volunteers.

Vlasov did not try to fool Heinrici. He explained that his plan had been to raise at least six divisions, hopefully ten, from prisoners of war in the camps. The problem was that the Nazi authorities had not come round to the idea until it was too late. He was aware of the risk of Soviet propaganda aimed at his men. Yet he felt that they should be allowed to prove themselves in an attack on one of the Oder bridgeheads.

General Busse chose for them an unimportant sector at Erlenhof, south of Frankfurt an der Oder. Soviet reconnaissance groups from the 33rd Army identified their presence almost immediately and a barrage of loudspeaker activity began. The advance of the
Vlasovtsy
started on 13 April. During two and a half hours' fighting, the 1st Division created a wedge 500 metres deep, but the Soviet artillery fire was so strong that they had to lie down. General Bunyachenko, their commander, seeing no sign of either air or artillery support which he thought that the Germans had promised, withdrew his men, disregarding Busse's order. The Vlasov division lost 370 men, including four officers. Busse was furious, and, on his recommendation, General Krebs ordered the division to be withdrawn from the front and stripped of its weapons, which would be used for 'better purposes'. The
Vlasovtsy
were deeply embittered. They blamed their reverse on the lack of artillery support, but perhaps nobody had warned them that German batteries were holding back their last rounds for the major attack.

During the first two weeks of April, sporadic fighting continued in the bridgeheads. Soviet attacks were aimed to deepen them. Behind the Oder, the activity was even more intense. Altogether, twenty-eight Soviet armies were involved in regrouping and redeploying in fifteen days. The commander of the 70th Army, Colonel General Popov, had to issue orders to corps commanders even before he received final instructions from above.

Several armies had large distances to cover and very little time. According to Soviet field regulations, a mechanized column was supposed to move 150 kilometres a day, but the 200th Rifle Division of the 49th Army managed to cover 358 kilometres in just twenty-five hours.

In the 3rd Shock Army, which had been diverted for the Pomeranian operation, soldiers feared that they would never make it back in time and 'would only get to Berlin when everybody else would be picking up their hats [to go home]'. No true
frontovik
wanted to miss the climax of the war. He knew the jealousy which formations of the 1st Belorussian Front inspired in the rest of the Red Army.

Although the real
frontoviki
were determined to see victory in Berlin, desertions increased as the offensive came closer. Most of those who disappeared were conscripts from the recent drafts, especially Poles, Ukrainians and Romanians. An increase in desertions also meant a growing level of banditry, looting and violence towards the civilian population: 'Some deserters seize carts from local citizens, load them with different sorts of property and, pretending that they are carts belonging to the army, move from the front zone to the rear areas.' NKVD rifle regiments behind the 1st Ukrainian Front arrested 355 deserters in the first part of April. The 1st Belorussian Front was even more concerned about discipline, as a report of 8 April reveals. 'Many soldiers are still hanging around in rear areas and describing themselves as separated from their units. They are in fact deserters. They carry out looting, robbery and violence. Recently up to 600 people were arrested in the sector of the 61st Army. All the roads are jammed with vehicles and carts used by military personnel on both legitimate missions and looting missions. They leave their vehicles and carts in the streets and in yards and wander around depots and apartments looking for things. Many officers, soldiers and NCOs are no longer looking like members of the Red Army. Some very serious deviations from standard uniform are being overlooked. It becomes difficult to distinguish between a soldier and an officer and between soldiers and civilians. Dangerous cases of disobedience to senior officers have taken place.'