The Fall of Berlin 1945 (24 page)

NKVD rifle regiments and SMERSH were also continuing their work of rounding up suspects. They were, in Beria's view, both insufficiently selective and over-zealous. They had dispatched 148,540 prisoners to NKVD camps in the Soviet Union, yet 'barely one half were in a condition to perform physical labour'. They had simply packed off 'the people who were arrested as a result of clearing the rear areas of the Red Army'. Some priorities, however, did not change. Polish patriots were still considered as dangerous as Nazis. And NKVD regiments continued to encounter small groups of German stragglers trying to slip through Red Army lines after the fighting in Pomerania and Silesia.

These small groups often ambushed the odd vehicle for food on the way, and the Soviet military authorities would respond, just as the Germans themselves had in the Soviet Union, by destroying the nearest village and shooting civilians.

The mood of Red Army officers and soldiers was tense but confident. Pyotr Mitrofanovich Sebelev, the second-in-command of an engineer brigade, had just been promoted to lieutenant colonel at the age of twenty-two. 'Hello Papa, Mama, Shura and Taya,' he wrote home on 10 April. 'At the moment, there is an unusual and therefore scaring quietness here. I was at a concert yesterday. Yes, don't be surprised, at a concert! given by artistes from Moscow. It cheered us up. We can't help thinking if only the war would finish as soon as possible, but I think it depends on us mainly. Two cases occurred yesterday which I must tell you about. I went to the front line with a man from the rear areas. We walked out of the forest and up a sandy mound, and lay down. The Oder was in front of us with a long spit of sand sticking out. The spit was occupied by Germans. Behind the Oder, the town of Küstrin, an ordinary town. Suddenly wet sand flew all around me and immediately I heard a shot: the Germans had spotted us and had begun shooting from this spit.

'Two hours ago, our recce men brought a captured German corporal to me who clicked his heels and immediately asked me through the interpreter, "Where am I, Mr Officer? Among Zhukov's troops, or in Rokossovsky's band?" I laughed and said to the German, "You are with the troops of the 1st Belorussian Front, which is commanded by Marshal Zhukov. But why do you call Marshal Rokossovsky's troops a band?" The corporal answered, "They don't follow the rules when fighting. This is why German soldiers call them a band."

'Another piece of news. My adjutant, Kolya Kovalenko, was wounded in the arm but he escaped from hospital. I reprimanded him for this and he cursed and said, "You are depriving me of the honour of being one of the first to enter Berlin with our boys." . . . Goodbye, kisses to all of you. Your Pyotr.'

For the truly committed majority, the greatest concern was the rapid advance of the Western Allies. In the 69th Army, the political department reported the soldiers as saying, 'Our advance is too slow and the Germans will surrender their capital to the English and Americans.'

Komsomol members in the 4th Guards Tank Army prepared for the offensive by getting experienced soldiers to talk to the newcomers about the reality of battle. Komsomol members also helped the barely literate ones write letters home. They were particularly proud of having bought a T-34 tank with their own money. Their tank 'Komsomolets' had already 'destroyed a few enemy tanks and other armoured vehicles and crushed many Fritzes under its tracks'. At Party meetings members were reminded that 'all Communists have a duty to speak out against looting and drinking'.

Artillery regiments, meanwhile, paid 'special attention to the replacement of casualties'. They foresaw that losses would increase sharply once they reached Berlin, because gun crews would be firing over open sights. Crew members therefore had to train hard in each other's tasks. And each regiment prepared a reserve of trained gun layers, ready to replace casualties.

To preserve secrecy, 'the local population was sent twenty kilometres back from the front line'. Radio silence was imposed and signs were placed by every field telephone: 'Don't speak about things you should not speak about.'

German preparations, on the other hand, emphasized the reprisals that would be carried out against all those who failed in their duty and against their families, whatever their rank. An announcement was made that General Lasch, the commander of Königsberg, had been condemned to death by hanging
in absentia
and his whole family arrested under the
Sippenhaft
law to persecute the closest relatives of traitors to the Nazi cause.

The final agony of East Prussia affected morale in Berlin almost as much as the threat from the Oder. On 2 April, Soviet artillery began its softening-up barrage on the centre of Königsberg. The Soviet artillery officer Senior Lieutenant Inozemstev recorded in his diary on 4 April that sixty shells from his battery had reduced one fortified building into 'a pile of stones'. The NKVD was concerned that nobody escaped.

'Encircled soldiers in Königsberg are putting on civilian clothes to get away. Documents must be checked more carefully in East Prussia.' 'The aviation is very effective,' Inozemstev wrote on 7 April. 'We are using flame-throwers on a massive scale. If there is only one German in a building he is chased out by the fire. There is no fighting for a storey or a staircase. It is already clear to everyone now that the storming of Königsberg will go down as a classic example of storming a big city.'

The next day, when his comrade Safonov was killed, the regiment fired a salute of salvoes at the citadel.

The destruction was terrible. Thousands of soldiers and civilians were buried by the bombardments. There was a 'smell of death in the air', Inozemstev wrote, 'literally - because thousands of corpses are decomposing under the ruins'. As the wounded filled every usable cellar, General Lasch knew that there was no hope. The 11th Guards Army and the 43rd Army had fought their way right into the city. Even Koch's deputy Gauleiter urged the abandonment of the city, but all links with the Samland Peninsula had been severed. A counter-attack was mounted to force a way through, but it collapsed in chaos on the night of 8 April.

The bombardment had blocked many of the routes leading to the start-line. The local Party leadership, without telling Lasch, had passed the word to civilians to assemble ready for the breakout, but their concentration attracted the attention of Soviet artillery observation officers and they were massacred.

The city was so enveloped in smoke the next day that only the fire-streaks of katyusha rockets were visible. Any civilians left alive hung sheets from windows in a signal of surrender and even tried to take rifles from German soldiers. Lasch knew that the end had come. He could expect no help from the Reich and did not want to impose any more useless suffering on the refugees and townsfolk. Only the SS wanted to fight on, but their attempts were useless. On the morning of 10 April, Lasch and other German officers acting as parliamentaries reached Marshal Vasilevsky's headquarters. The surviving garrison of just over 30,000 troops marched out to imprisonment. Their watches and any useful items were promptly grabbed by Red Army soldiers, who had managed to find stores of alcohol. The rape of women and girls went unchecked in the ruined city.

Inozemstev toured the smoking capital of East Prussia. 'A bronze Bismarck is gazing with one eye — part of his head had been knocked off by a shell — at the Soviet girl conducting the traffic, at the passing Red Army vehicles and at the mounted patrols. It looked as if he were asking, "Why are there Russians here? Who allowed that?"'

The end of East Prussia and Pomerania was underlined in a terrible fashion. On the night of 16 April, the hospital ship
Goya
, packed with over 7,000 refugees, was sunk by a Soviet submarine. It was the greatest disaster in maritime history. Only 165 people were saved.

The attack on Berlin was expected at any moment. On 6 April, Army Group Vistula headquarters noted in its war diary: 'On Ninth Army front, lively enemy activity — sounds of engines and tank tracks both on the Reitwein sector south-west of Küstrin and to the north-east near Kienitz.' They estimated that the attack would come in two days' time. Five days later, however, they were still waiting. General Krebs at Zossen signalled to Heinrici on 11 April, 'Führer expects the Russian offensive against Army Group Vistula on 12 or 13 April.' Next day, Hitler told Krebs to telephone Heinrici to insist 'the Führer is instinc- tively convinced that the attack would really come in one to two days, that is to say on the 13 or 14 April'. Hitler had tried to predict the exact date of the Normandy invasion the year before, but failed. Now he again wanted to amaze his admirers with a show of uncanny foresight. It seemed to be one of the few ways left to him in which he could attempt to demonstrate some sort of control over events.

On the evening of 12 April, the Berlin Philharmonic gave its last performance. Albert Speer, who organized it, had invited Grand Admiral Dönitz and also Hitler's adjutant, Colonel von Below. The hall was properly lit for the occasion, despite the electricity cuts. 'The concert took us back to another world,' wrote Below. The programme included Beethoven's Violin Concerto, Bruckner's 8th Symphony - (Speer later claimed that this was his warning signal to the orchestra to escape Berlin immediately after the performance to avoid being drafted into the Volkssturm) - and the finale to Wagner's
Götterdämmerung
. Even if Wagner did not bring the audience back to present reality, the moment of escapism did not last long. It is said that, after the performance, the Nazi Party had organized Hitler Youth members to stand in uniform with baskets of cyanide capsules and offer them to members of the audience as they left.

On 14 April, when the attack had still not materialized, Hitler issued an 'Order of the Day' to Army Group Vistula. Predictably, it emphasized that 'whoever does not fulfil his duty will be treated as a traitor to our people'. It continued with a rambling distortion of history, and a reference to the repulse of the Turks before Vienna: 'The Bolshevik will this time experience the ancient fate of Asiatics.' Vienna had in fact just fallen to the eastern hordes and there was no hope of retaking it.

The following day, a sixteen-year-old Berliner called Dieter Borkovsky described what he witnessed in a crowded S-Bahn train from the Anhalter Bahnhof. 'There was terror on the faces of people. They were full of anger and despair. I had never heard such cursing before. Suddenly someone shouted above the noise, "Silence!" We saw a small dirty soldier with two Iron Crosses and the German Cross in Gold. On his sleeve he had a badge with four metal tanks, which meant that he had destroyed four tanks at close quarters. "I've got something to tell you," he shouted, and the carriage fell silent. "Even if you don't want to listen to me, stop whingeing. We have to win this war. We must not lose our courage. If others win the war, and if they do to us only a fraction of what we have done in the occupied territories, there won't be a single German left in a few weeks." It became so quiet in that carriage that one could have heard a pin drop.'

13
Americans on the Elbe

As the allied armies approached the heart of Germany from both directions, Berliners claimed that optimists were 'learning English and pessimists learning Russian'. The Nazi foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, who had no sense of humour, announced at a diplomatic dinner that 'Germany had lost the war but still had it in her power to decide to whom she lost'. It was this idea that disturbed Stalin so profoundly at the beginning of April.

Once Model's Army Group B with over 300,000 men was encircled in the Ruhr on 2 April, the divisions in Simpson's US Ninth Army began racing for the Elbe opposite Berlin. They and their army commander were convinced that their objective was the Nazis' capital. After the row with the British, Eisenhower had left open the capture of Berlin as a distinct possibility. In the second part of the orders to Simpson, the Ninth Army was told to 'exploit any opportunity for seizing a bridgehead over the Elbe and be prepared to continue the advance on Berlin or to the north-east'.

Its 2nd Armored Division - dubbed 'Hell on Wheels' - was the strongest in the US Army. It contained a large number of tough southerners who had joined during the Depression. Its commander, Major General Isaac D. White, had planned his route to Berlin well in advance. His idea was to cross the Elbe near Magdeburg. The US Ninth Army would use the autobahn to the capital as its centre-line. His close rival in the race was the 83rd Infantry Division, known as the 'Rag-Tag Circus' because of its extraordinary assortment of captured vehicles and equipment sprayed olive green and given a white star. Both divisions reached the River Weser on 5 April.

To their north the 5th Armored Division headed for Tangermünde, and on the extreme left of Simpson's front, the 84th and 102nd Infantry Divisions pushed towards the Elbe on either side of its confluence with the Havel. The momentum of the advance was slowed momentarily by pockets of resistance, usually SS detachments, but most German troops surrendered in relief. The American crews stopped only to replenish or repair their vehicles. They remained dirty and unshaven. The adrenalin of the advance had almost replaced their need for sleep. The 84th Division was held up when ordered to take Hanover, but forty-eight hours later, it was ready to move on again. Eisenhower visited its commander, Major General Alexander Bolling, in Hanover on Sunday 8 April.

'Alex, where are you going next?' Eisenhower said to him. 'General, we're going to push on ahead. We have a clear go to Berlin and nothing can stop us.'

'Keep going,' the supreme commander told him, putting a hand on his shoulder. 'I wish you all the luck in the world and don't let anybody stop you.' Bolling took this as clear confirmation that their objective was Berlin.

On the US Ninth Army's left, the British Second Army of General Dempsey had reached Celle and was close to liberating Belsen concentration camp. Meanwhile, on Simpson's right, General Hodges's First Army headed for Dessau and Leipzig. General George Patton's Third Army forced its way ahead the furthest, into the Harz mountains, bypassing Leipzig to the south. On Thursday 5 April, Martin Bormann jotted in his diary, 'Bolsheviks near Vienna. Americans in the Thuringerwald.' No further comment was needed on the disintegration of Greater Germany.